Bringing a centre of excellence to your Company with Microsoft Power Platform

If your organisation has implemented Microsoft Power Platform, you already know how it helps to ease the workload of your IT team by making it easier to create solutions that address new processes or workflows. Power Platform has completely revolutionised the way IT departments handle projects, resources, budgets, and time.

If you are responsible for your organisation’s IT, you know how important responsibly managing development is — and Power Platform is no exception!

This is where the Power Platform Centre of Excellence comes in.

If you aren’t familiar with the Power Platform Centre of Excellence (CoE), don’t worry! In this blog post, we’ll inform you on how you can bring a Centre of Excellence to your company with Microsoft Power Platform CoE.

What is the Power Platform Centre of Excellence?

Microsoft Power Platform Centre of Excellence functions to breakdown geographic and organisational silos to drive innovation and improvement within your company. It brings together like-minded people with similar business goals to share knowledge, while simultaneously providing standards, consistency, and governance.

When you establish a CoE in your organisation, you are investing and nurturing organic growth while maintaining governance and control. For many companies, the CoE is the first step they will take in cultivating greater creativity and innovation across the organisation. The CoE will allow them to empower business units by digitising and automating their business processes, all while maintaining central oversight and governance. 

How can I set up a Centre of Excellence?

When setting up a Centre of Excellence within your company, it’s important to consider:

  • The reason you’re setting up a Centre of Excellence
  • What you aim to accomplish with it
  • The key business outcomes you hope to achieve with a CoE

Once you’ve clarified these key principles, you can get started, and learn and evolve along the way.

Steps to establish a Centre of Excellence

To successfully set up your Centre of Excellence, Microsoft recommends the following four steps:

Secure: Create an environment strategy and governance framework to establish data loss prevention policies, and manage licenses and access to data sources.

Evangelise: Provide a community space on Teams, Yammer, or, SharePoint with a collection of links for your team to start their learning.

Monitor: Monitor your usage, who is creating apps, what apps are being created, and how they are being used.

Evolve: As you learn, you will also evolve CoE strategy with new findings.

Who should be involved in the Centre of Excellence?

Typically, the following departments will be key drivers or stakeholders within a CoE:

  • App and flow makers
  • Central IT
  • Support and training engineers
  • Change managers
  • DevOps users

Key takeaways:

  • Microsoft Power Platform Centre of Excellence functions to breakdown geographic and organisational silos to drive innovation and improvement.
  • Before setting up a CoE, consider the reason behind it, what you aim to accomplish, and the outcomes you hope to achieve. 
  • The four steps to set up a CoE are secure, evangelise, monitor, and evolve.

Are you interested in establishing a Power Platform Centre of Excellence within your organisation? Book a free call to speak to one of the experts at Proximo 3.