Establish a Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence

Establishing a Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence or Center of Enablement (CoE) is a strategic move that can maximize the platform’s potential and ensure its sustainable, scalable, and secure use across the enterprise. The CoE’s mission is to drive a culture of excellence by fostering innovation and efficiency. The aim is to create a strong foundation for rapid solution development and deployment, boosting productivity and supporting your commitment to excellence.

This article outlines the key steps and best practices for setting up a successful Power Platform CoE.

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Establishing a CoE is key to driving operational excellence. A CoE offers governance, best practices, and support to help your organization adopt Power Platform more effectively. A key principle is to clarify why you're setting up a CoE, what you aim to accomplish, and the key business outcomes you hope to achieve. Then get started and learn and evolve along the way. Defining clear vision, metrics, and goals helps you achieve positive business outcomes and alignment with your organizational strategy.

A CoE is designed to drive innovation and improvement. By centralizing expertise and resources, a CoE accelerates adoption, ensures compliance, and builds a culture of continuous improvement, empowering your organization to maximize the full potential of Power Platform. As a central function it can break down geographic and organizational silos to bring together like-minded people with similar business goals to share knowledge and success. It also provides standards, consistency, and governance to the organization. In summary, a CoE can be a powerful way for an organization to align around business goals rather than individual department metrics.

Strategic planning and alignment with organizational goals keep the CoE focused on what matters most—achieving the organization's vision, maximizing team potential, boosting collaboration, and enabling smarter decisions.

By staying connected to the broader strategy, the CoE can drive high-impact initiatives, respond swiftly to change, and engage stakeholders at every level, all of which propel the organization toward lasting success.

Learn more: Establish a Center of Excellence with governance patterns and practices

Form a core team

Typically, the following people or departments are key drivers or stakeholders when establishing a Center of Excellence:

• Executive sponsors: Senior leaders who provide strategic direction and secure necessary resources. They assist the CoE team in identifying and prioritizing business needs, communicate the vision to leaders, actively use Power Platform to drive adoption, and promote the process with visible executive sponsor engagement.
• CoE lead: A dedicated leader responsible for overseeing the CoE’s operations and initiatives.
• Subject matter experts (SMEs): Individuals with deep knowledge of Power Platform and specific business domains.
• Developers and IT professionals: Technical experts who can build and maintain solutions.
• Change management specialists: Professionals who can drive user adoption and manage organizational change.
• Technology admins: Administrators who enable adoption by ensuring platform security, compliance, and efficiency. They support effective use through environment strategies, governance policies, user and capacity management, and data availability using connectors, integration, or migration.
• Power Platform champions: Enthusiastic users who advocate for Power Platform within the organization. They give feedback to the CoE team on which processes work, which don't, and where the maker community might need extra support.

Clearly defined roles and responsibilities are essential for the sustained success of your Power Platform Center of Excellence. To ensure clarity in goals, roles, and tasks, learn more about defining roles and responsibilities.

The evolution of roles within a Center of Excellence (CoE) is a natural part of its growth. Initially, focus on engaging stakeholders across the organization instead of defining every role perfectly. As the CoE matures and adoption increases, refine and expand roles based on team needs and feedback.

Establish governance and standards

Governance is a cornerstone of a successful Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE). It ensures that the platform is used securely, compliantly, and efficiently across the organization.

Effective governance involves developing and enforcing standards and policies in several key areas:

• Data security and privacy: Data security and privacy are paramount in today's digital age. The CoE must ensure that all data handled within Power Platform solutions is protected and compliant with relevant regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA. This process involves categorizing data based on sensitivity and implementing appropriate protection measures, implementing strict access controls to ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive data, and regularly conducting audits to ensure compliance with data protection regulations.

• Solution development: Defining best practices for solution development is essential to maintain consistency, quality, and efficiency. The CoE should establish comprehensive guidelines that cover various aspects of development. These guidelines include setting coding standards and naming conventions to ensure readability and maintainability, establishing rigorous testing protocols to ensure solutions are robust and reliable, and defining processes for deploying solutions to different environments, such as development, testing, and production. Learn more in Power Apps coding guidelines and Power Automate coding guidelines.

• User access and permissions: Managing user access and permissions is critical to maintaining security and preventing unauthorized changes. The CoE should implement role-based access control (RBAC) to assign permissions based on users' roles and responsibilities. RBAC ensures that users have the minimum level of access necessary to perform their tasks according to the principle of least privilege (also know as the "least privilege principle"). Conduct regular reviews of user access and permissions to identify and address any discrepancies. Additionally, maintain audit trails to track who accessed or modified solutions and data.

• Monitoring and reporting: Continuous monitoring and reporting are vital to track the usage, performance, and compliance of the Power Platform. The CoE should monitor platform usage through usage analytics to identify trends, optimize resource allocation, and ensure efficient use. Tracking performance metrics helps identify and address any issues that may impact the user experience. Conduct regular compliance monitoring to ensure adherence to established standards and policies. Additionally, generate reports to provide insights into platform usage, performance, and compliance to stakeholders.

Learn more:

• Power Platform security overview and strategy
• Power Platform governance overview and strategy
• Power Platform operations overview and strategy

Provide training and support

To maximize the impact of Power Platform, the CoE should offer comprehensive training and support to users.

• Training programs: Provide structured training programs to equip users with the knowledge and skills they need to effectively use Power Platform tools. These programs can include a variety of formats such as in-person workshops, online courses, webinars, and hands-on labs. The training should cover fundamental concepts, advanced techniques, and best practices for using Power Platform tools like Power Apps, Power Automate, and Copilot Studio. Tailor the training content to different user roles and skill levels so that everyone, from beginners to advanced users, can benefit.

• Documentation and resources: Create a comprehensive library of documentation and resources to support makers. The documentation should include detailed guides, step-by-step tutorials, FAQs, and troubleshooting tips. Well-organized and easily accessible documentation helps users find answers to questions quickly and efficiently. Provide templates, sample applications, and code snippets to accelerate the development process and inspire users to create their own solutions.

• Community of practice: Establish a community of practice to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing among users. Set up forums, user groups, and online communities where employees can ask questions, share their experiences, and collaborate on projects. Set up regularly scheduled meetups, webinars, and hackathons to further encourage engagement and innovation. By creating a supportive community, the CoE can help users stay motivated, learn from each other, and continuously improve their skills.

Learn more:

• Power Platform readiness overview and strategy
• Power Platform community overview and strategy

Foster innovation and continuous improvement

The CoE should promote a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

• Encourage experimentation: Create an environment where employees feel empowered to explore and experiment with Power Platform. Provide sandbox environments where users can test new ideas without impacting production systems. Encourage a mindset of experimentation to uncover innovative solutions and allow employees to learn from both successes and failures. Provide resources such as tutorials, templates, and access to advanced features to further stimulate creativity and exploration.

• Recognize and reward success: Celebrate achievements and recognize contributors to maintain motivation and foster a positive culture. Highlight successful projects through internal newsletters, company-wide meetings, or dedicated recognition events. Implement a rewards program that acknowledges outstanding contributions to incentivize employees to strive for excellence. By showcasing success stories, the CoE can inspire others and demonstrate the tangible benefits of leveraging the Power Platform.

• Collect feedback: Regularly gather feedback from users for continuous improvement. Implement mechanisms such as surveys and focus groups to collect insights from users about their experiences and challenges. Analyze this feedback to identify areas for improvement and inform the development of new features or enhancements. Create open channels for feedback to encourage a culture of transparency and collaboration.

• Stay updated: Keep abreast of the latest Power Platform features and industry trends to maintain a competitive edge. Regularly review updates from Microsoft, attend industry conferences, and participate in relevant webinars and training sessions. Share this knowledge with the broader organization through newsletters, workshops, or internal training sessions to ensure everyone stays informed about new capabilities and best practices. Staying updated also enables the CoE to proactively adopt new features and integrate them into existing processes.

Measure and communicate success

To track the progress and success of Power Platform adoption and your CoE, it’s essential to define, monitor, and report on clear success metrics. Set well-defined success criteria and metrics to give your team direction, measure performance, foster accountability, drive continuous improvement, and align CoE efforts with organizational strategy.

This structured approach enhances effectiveness, showcases value, and fuels innovation. Choose the framework that best suits your needs. Here are a few tools to help define success criteria and metrics:

• Define key performance indicators (KPIs): Establish metrics to track the CoE’s performance. Learn more in Define vision, metrics and goals.
• Measure the business value of Power Platform solutions: Measure business value in Power Platform to ensure success and return on investment. Learn more in Business value measurement.
• Provide reporting: Provide regular updates to executive sponsors and other stakeholders.
• Showcase success stories: Share case studies and testimonials to demonstrate the value of the CoE. Learn more in Share success stories.

Next step

Clearly defining roles and responsibilities is important for the successful adoption of Power Platform and for establishing a Center of Excellence, as it ensures clarity, accountability, and efficient implementation. This approach fosters collaboration, aligns initiatives with strategic goals, and ensures compliance and security.