Your Power Platform Centre of Excellence: The Key to CRM Success

A CRM solution is only as powerful as the people who use it and the strategies that guide it. That’s where a Power Platform Centre of Excellence (CoE) comes in. Think of it as the brain trust for your CRM—ensuring best practices, governance, and innovation are all in place.

Gartner puts it best: A Center of Excellence is essential to drive both business and IT success in digital transformation “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

Without a CoE, CRM / Power Platform projects can become a free-for-all—with inconsistent processes, duplicate apps, and security headaches. A well-structured CoE stops this chaos in its tracks and ensures that your Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 deliver long-term value.

What Does a Power Platform Centre of Excellence Do?

A CoE acts as a guiding force, ensuring that your CRM and Power Platform apps are implemented, used, and maintained effectively. Here’s what it covers:

✅ Strategy & Governance – Setting the rules of engagement so Power Platform solutions are scalable, secure, and aligned with business goals.
✅ Innovation & Best Practices – Encouraging smart use of Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI, while avoiding duplication and inefficiencies.
✅ User Enablement & Training – Providing the knowledge and skills needed for both IT teams and business users to get the most out of your CRM.
✅ Monitoring & Continuous Improvement – Keeping an eye on usage, security, and performance, ensuring everything runs smoothly as your business evolves.

Why Your Business Can’t Afford to Skip a CoE

A lack of governance can lead to a wild west of app creation—with employees building solutions that don’t integrate properly or are riddled with security risks. On the flip side, too much control stifles innovation and frustrates users who need flexibility.

A CoE strikes the perfect balance, ensuring your Power Platform environment remains structured yet nimble enough to support real business needs.

How Opsis Can Help

We help organisations establish a Centre of Excellence that works for them—whether you’re starting from scratch or need to refine your existing approach. Our expertise in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform ensures that your CoE is practical, effective, and built to last.

Let’s Future-Proof Your CRM Strategy A Centre of Excellence isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’—it’s an essential part of long-term CRM success. If you’re ready to take control of your Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment, let’s talk.

Book a complimentary consultation with our CRM Success Catalyst today!

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

Gill Walker unpacking the Microsoft Power Platform CoE Starter Kit   

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

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.

Book a complimentary consultation with our CRM Success Catalyst today!