Powering up your business for the Power Platform revolution

And if you’re thinking about making the move soon, here are six easy steps you can follow to get your organisation ready for Power Platform… 

1. Focus on your tenants 

The first step is to secure a tenant-wide data policy – regardless of your environment strategy. After all, data policies are the key to protecting your data, and will help you prevent any risks from new environments that get created. 

For security purposes, it’s also advisable to have a mechanism that can prevent outside tenants from creating connections to your tenant (inbound isolation) and also prevent your tenant from creating connections to outside tenants (outbound isolation). Such occurrences can be problematic and risky to your data. Tenant isolation can be used to create these blocks, preventing data leakage.   

2. Utilise the CoE starter kit 

The Microsoft CoE Starter Kit is a collection of components and tools that help you implement best practices for developing, managing, and governing your Power Platform environments. It consists of four core modules: Core Components, Governance Components, Nurture Components, and Analytics Components. Each module has a set of Power Apps, Power Automate flows, Power BI dashboards, and other resources that enable you to monitor and manage various aspects of your Power Platform ecosystem, such as: 

- Who are the makers and users of Power Apps and Power Automate in your organisation 

- What apps and flows are being created and how they are being used 

- How compliant and secure are the apps and flows in terms of data policies and connectors 

- How to educate and empower your makers to build high-quality solutions 

- How to promote and share best practices and reusable components across your maker community 

The CoE Starter Kit can help you gain visibility and control over your Power Platform inventory, enforce governance policies, foster a culture of innovation and collaboration, and optimise your return on investment.  

3. Prep for your data policies 

Next, you’ll need to review the connections in the tenant to see what was built with which connectors. This will help you set your next data policies and determine which solutions belong in each environment. 

What’s more, solution sizing is a useful way to determine what people can make. This will lead to a change in behaviour when creating inventory items in Power Platform and will determine how items are organised and kept. 

4. Establish your environment strategy 

Next, and this is a crucial step, is to establish an efficient environment strategy. With a full account of what sits where and where things are being created, you can correctly categorise solutions, making things much easier to support and manage.  

It will then be time to target your environments, as this will help you maintain control of your data. You’ll need to decide which connectors will be accessible in which environments, and who will have the permission to create in them.  

5. Consider your application lifecycle management (ALM) process 

Your ALM process is the full journey from ideation through to building, deploying, engaging, supporting, reviewing, and sunsetting your solution. It’s more than just a simple case of moving things between environments. In order to succeed, you’ll need to establish what this journey will look like for your business. Every business is different, and as such every solution is different too. Think about what rules and processes you want, and jot down all your findings.  

6. Pay attention to your makers 

Establish your maker archetypes based on who is making what, and where they need to make it. Maker archetypes are categories of makers that have certain characteristics. These categories can help direct makers to the appropriate settings where they can create what they want to make.  

Finally, you need to think about your makers’ journey. It’s important that you equip your makers with everything they need to build and solve problems quickly and efficiently. You need to create a smooth process and programme that will enable them to produce solutions in a protected space without affecting other areas of the organisation.