Why should you have a Centre of Excellence for your Microsoft Power Platform project?

Gartner describes an effective Centre of Excellence as “concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value”.   Your Centre of Excellence acts as the driver for your Microsoft Power Platform project - providing direction, acceleration, braking and more.   Additionally, your Centre of Excellence holds visible expertise, so other members of the project team can source proficiency easily.

The Role of a Centre of Excellence, as Gill Walker described it at the Global Power Platform Bootcamp in February 2023

A centre of excellence is highly likely to increase the success of your Power Platform / Dynamics 365 project.

Working with Opsis to set up your Power Platform Centre of Excellence gives you many advantages.

We work with you to understand your “Why?”

• Why are you using Microsoft’s Power Platform
  
  
• What do you expect Power Platform to deliver to you?
  
  
• What is working well for you in Power Platform, and what could be improved?

We will never know your business as well as well as you do. We work with you to meld our insights and deep technical knowledge with your business expertise to deliver your CRM success.

Your Centre of Excellence is a team of key people from your business, your technical team (internal and external, if appropriate) led by Opsis Principal CRM Success Catalyst, Gill Walker.

Your Power Platform Centre of Excellence enables you to avoid project failure, because it provides:

• Education
• Business knowledge combined with communication skills
• Technical knowledge
• Leadership

The Opsis approach to a Power Platform / Dynamics 365 centre of excellence includes a wide range of education, so your team can go forth and successfully manage your CRM.  Typically, we will meet fortnightly to look at how the project is progressing and what is required and from whom in the next fortnight.

The Opsis approach to a Power Platform / Dynamics 365 centre of excellence includes a wide range of education, so your team can go forth and successfully manage your solution. The Opsis approach also ensures that you avoid the dreaded “drive-by project”.  A drive-by project is where a vendor, is more interested in getting in, getting paid, then getting out rather than in partnering in your success. This leaves your project to slowly fail – and if you are very unlucky, a repeat of the experience.

Key causes of project failure are:

• The project lacks goals
  
  
• The project does not have appropriate people with the right skills to deliver the project;
  
  
• The business requirements are poorly articulated
  
  
• Business requirements only address the current, not the future needs; - this is like driving using only the rear-view mirror
  
  
• The out of the box solution is used when it does not fit the business process – rather than configuring a solution that works for your business processes;
  
  
• Adoption, Change Management and training get insufficient attention, time and budget;
  
  
• There is a lack of understanding of licensing causing incorrect selection of products;
  
  
• And last, but not least, the ownership of the project is allowed to go outside the organisation

Your Power Platform Centre of Excellence enables you to avoid all of these causes of project failure, because it provides:

• Education
• Business knowledge combined with communication skills
• Technical knowledge
• Leadership

While the Microsoft Power Platform CoE Starter kit is extremely useful, it is not the complete solution to your Centre of Excellence.  I like to think of the CoE like a quick noodle meal – good, but not complete.

Gill Walker's analogy of the CoE Starter Kit as a noodle meal that needs water - people - to be useful.

So what is in the CoE Starter Kit?

The CoE Starter kit contains a range of tools for your Centre of Excellence to use to manage your Power Platform Environment.  It provides a collections of apps, flows, dashboards and email templates to assist with communicating with your wider audience to help them maintain compliance.

The CoE Starter Kit is a great tool for organisations to increase the visibility of what their app makers are doing in their tenant. 

Its main focus is Power Apps and Power Automate.

The Microsoft Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is a collection of components and tools that are designed to help you get started with developing a strategy for adopting and supporting Microsoft Power Platform – especially with Citizen Developers

Power Platform admins must balance security and adoption – this includes creating and enforcing Data Loss Policies (DLP) and managing usage with its associated cost

The CoE Starter Kit includes tools and processes to

• Manage apps and flows when their owner has left – orphaned apps and flows
• Check compliance of apps and flows – knowing that an app meets security requirements is essential for adoption. Users need to know that data is safe.   Apps are quarantined if the business justification is not provided
• Identify and manage unused apps and flows – this is important to manage sprawl

Gill Walker unpacking the Microsoft Power Platform CoE Starter Kit   

When you work with with Opsis to set up your Centre of Excellence you get far more than the tools that come in the CoE Starter Kit.  We work with you to identify the best people to drive your project, and we provide training and mentoring to members of the Centre of Excellence, and more widely, where that adds value to your project.