Power Apps Viking

UPDATE: This post became popular so it’s probably going to turn into a series of CoE posts. Stay tuned for more.

Do you have a long-term Power Platform strategy? or even a short-term one?

If you are like most companies, then the answer is probably no.

Is this a bad thing? It depends. But if you are serious about Power Platform adoption then you should be considering some sort of strategy. In this post I want to help paint a clearer picture of what exactly the Center of Excellence(CoE) could do (and what it can’t do) for you.

If you are like most companies I have seen working with the Power Platform, you are either doing in-house development, hiring external vendors, or a bit of both. What typically happens next is that each time a new environment – or a series of environments – needs to be created, the manager for the team, or the person responsible for the project, gets in touch with IT and they create the environment(s). Then the magical sentence “now you are in charge/responsible for this” is said, and usually no one thinks about it again. Essentially, the person in charge is trusted with knowing how to manage the Power Platform Environment and will do so accordingly.

Spoiler: They usually don’t.

This is one of the main issues that you want to solve with the Power Platform Center of Excellence. Lack of transparency and lack of ownership.

Now, the process described above is a lot like requesting many other IT resources, like an SQL database or other Azure resources. But there is a significant difference between the two. First of all, most IT departments have a quite clear Azure strategy, maybe even an Azure Center of Excellence. Second, because the Azure CoE team has done their homework, those resources are more easily tracked and managed in Azure.

The last part is especially important. Because even in the lack of a process and a clear person in charge – Sometimes people change to other positions or leave the company – tracking/managing the resource still works if there is a system for it.

This is where the Power Platform Center of Excellence* enters the picture. Built by the amazing Power CAT team, the CoE offers a large range of tools supporting the entire lifecycle of Power Apps Development, from requesting environments, access to Power Automate Connectors, to restricting access as well as gaining an overview of the current Power Platform landscape (with metrics such as number of environments, apps, flows, etc.). All this can be either complete overkill for a smaller company or department using only a few apps and flows, or a full-time job for a company that has several hundred or even thousands of citizen developers.

*If you want to just get the CoE kit then here is a link to the official site for the Center of Excellence Starter Kit

Creating a Power Platform strategy

Your focus before considering whether or not you actually need to work with the Power Platform CoE, should be what your Power Platform strategy is in the first place.

A primary question you can start with is: What do you want to achieve with the Power Platform in the company?

• Do you want to just enable access to an application built by a third-party vendor?
• Do you want a specialized team to be able to create apps or flows (perhaps RPA)? Or
• Do you want to open the possibility for citizen developers in multiple departments to utilize the benefits of a low-code platform to leapfrog productivity and avoid unnecessary development costs at the same time.

Perhaps you want to start with the first and gradually move towards the last or sit somewhere in-between. No matter what, the power platform strategy should inform your decision to utilize the Power Platform CoE.

I can boil down my own advice and experience to the following: I would advise companies to make use of the benefits of the low-code Power Platform as much as possible, and I would do this by allowing as much access to the platform as possible for citizen developers. Furthermore, this should be done knowing full well that at some point, some citizen developers are going to create environments, apps, flows, etc. that might not comply with your current ideas of best practices. This is not necessarily a bad thing, if you catch it early enough. If users generally feel like they have the freedom to create awesome apps and flows, they will do that – in most cases – and you only need to focus on the ones that could be problematic.

Can I actually do that?

The answer for this is one of the great use-cases of the Power Platform Center of Excellence. The ability to find apps/flows/etc. that can cause issues and engage in a dialogue with the citizen developer early on about this. This does not require a set-up with 24/7 surveillance. Most admins (depending on the size of the company/number of citizen developers) can do this with a simple 5-10 minute check every 2-14 days.

So how do I get started?

It takes a few hours to set up your Center of Excellence, but the set-up itself does not require that much. The most important things to focus on is the following:

Center of Excellence getting started check-list:

• Define what you want to achieve with the Center of Excellence
• Identify who will support this
• Assess which level of freedom you want to provide for citizen developers
• Identify which processes needs to be in place to find the perfect fit between keeping IT happy and keeping Citizen Devs happy
• Define what your mid- and long-term goals are for the Power Platform and how can the Center of Excellence support this goal

With the checklist complete, even if somewhat vague for things such as the last one, you are ready to get started with you CoE adventure. And remember, the only thing worse than starting out with a draft version of the 5-year plan for your CoE, is not doing anything at all and finding that all your SharePoint data is being shared to X directly through a Power Automate flow that’s been running for six months. Which is a real thing that could happen with no CoE – and no DLP Policy – in place.

So, to answer the question in the title, you might need A Power Platform Center of Excellence, or you might not, I can’t really answer that for you. What I can say is, you need to do some groundwork before you can actually reap any benefits from it. To add to that, after installing the Center of Excellence, your problems are not magically fixed without continued use and support in the organization. A good way to perceive your Power Platform governance journey is to compare it to running a marathon. Setting up the CoE is similar to running the first 500meters, once you have finished the initial installation, the real fun begins.

That being said, have fun with setting up your CoE and feel free to reach out for any questions! There will be more CoE content coming in the future, where I will cover what to do once you installed the CoE Starter Kit and need to work with all the other elements of Power Platform governance – the remaining ~42 kms of the marathon.