We have been asked by few customers on creating successful outcomes using Power Platform through their organisation’s Center of Excellence. Before we proceed, lets look at what is Center of Excellence (CoE) is? A Center of Excellence (CoE) in an organisation drives innovation and improvement and brings together like-minded people with similar business goals to share knowledge and success, while at the same time providing standards, consistency, and governance to the organisation. Hope that explains?
However how CoE for Power Platform can be developed as part of your organisation? Microsoft has recently released the Power Platform CoE Starter Kit to help assist with this process.
This CoE is a collection of tools to help you develop a company-wide Microsoft Power Platform adoption strategy to spur rapid application development, support makers, and align around company-wide business goals rather than individual departments. A CoE is important because it is designed to drive innovation, improvement, and to serve as a central function to break down geographic and organisational siloes.
CoE helps with managing three essential aspects of adopting Microsoft Power Platform:
- Administration: It is important to establish clear governance guidelines to reduce the risk of shadow IT. Manage how makers are using databases, connectors, and permissions. Streamline duplicates and shared apps, archive unused apps, transfer ownership when makers leave the company, etc. Having these clear guidelines minimizes overburdening IT while enabling innovation. CoE dashboard has admin center capabilities to manage permissions, set rules for data access, APIs, and connectors.
- Operations: Orchestration of people processes and technology. CoE dashboard provides a full view of what apps are being used, who is using them, and how often they are being used. Low code platform empowers businesses to build apps by people who understand business at a fraction of the cost with low code. With the growing maker movement, businesses are building more shadow apps that must be managed to ensure success. CoE starter kit also has pre-built templates for enabling best practices.
- Empower: Enable and
empower makers. Who is involved in building the Microsoft Power Platform
community in your organisation? What training and support is needed? CoE is the
first step toward encouraging greater creativity and innovation across the
company by allowing business units to digitize and automate their operations
while yet retaining the appropriate degree of central supervision and
governance. You may find low-code enthusiasts in business groups, functional
teams, operations, or even field teams. It is important to identify and nurture
your community according to their specific role:
- Champions empower the maker community by offering expert help and ongoing mentoring to internal makers. You should plan for training these trainers to keep them current on the latest and the greatest.
- Organisational change agents create awareness, facilitate classroom training or hackathons, distribute demos or templates, and create success stories.
- Developers migrate legacy applications, create new app templates, and build architecture designs.
- Operations and engineering automation enable self-service guardrails for using connectors, APIs, data entities, and are responsible for metrics and monitoring usage.
- Whether your organisation is just getting started with low-code or has already been on a low-code journey for some time, a CoE will ensure your organisation has Microsoft Power Platform success.
How can we help you?
Depending on where you are in your low-code adoption journey, we can help you in establishing the Center of Excellence, or even conduct other adoption workshops such as Envisioning, Admin in a day, Legacy app assessment, or support planning.
Prometix as a Microsoft Gold certified O365 consultants (Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne & Perth), have delivered numerous Power Platform based solutions. If you need any assistance, please feel free to contact us via enquiries@prometix.com.au.
