Center of Excellence Starter Kit – What and why?

Many organization struggles with Power Platform. They know it is brilliant platform. But they are little bit afraid of the whole citizen developer story.

What kind of mess it could be if we let all the users build solutions with these tools?

But reality is that users usually don’t ask your permission. If they need something and they have skills to build it, they just do it. Simple as that.

At the same time you make plans about what kind of environments your organization will need, users might have created tens or even hundreds of Power Apps and Flows in your default environment.

My advice is to start focusing on how to support these citizen developers rather than how to prevent them to build what ever they are building.

Overview of the environments

Unfortunately this is little bit tricky. You should know thing like

• Who already make Power Apps and Flow in our organization? Who are top makers?
• How much we have different Power Apps and Flow currently?
• Which of the solutions are in real use?
• What data sources makers typically use?
• Are they using premium connectors?
• etc

If you allready have several environments, having this kind of information is not easy task.

Center of Excellence

Luckily we have Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit. It contains plenty of useful features, but in the beginning of the Power Platform journey you really need just a few of them. The core components.

With the core components you will have great overview of your environments. You get model-driven app that contains information about environments, connectors, Power Apps, Flows and makers.

You get also Power BI report with the same data.

Build with Power Platform

Best part of Center of Excellence (CoE) is that it is build with Power Platform tools

• Data is gathered by using Flows
• Data is stored in Common Data Service (CDS)
• Admin view is model-driven Power App
• There are several other tools in the package build as canvas Power Apps

This means that you can develop the CoE further to match the way you like to manage your Power Platform environments.

For example I usually build a little bit simpler reports supporting just use cases customer needs in the beginning.

Start to use it. Today.

If you are struggling with your Power Platform environment please do yourself a favour and install Power Platform Center of Excellence starter kit today.

Note: This post is shorter version of post I originally published on my personal blog. You can read it here (in Finnish of course).

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