The Microsoft Power Platform has become a popular choice for organizations looking to accelerate their digital transformation journey. With the platform’s low-code or no-code applications, businesses can quickly automate and digitize their operations. However, implementing the power platform requires careful planning and execution to derive maximum benefits. 

To achieve desired business outcomes, organizations need to adopt a guided strategy, vision, and best practices. This approach can help businesses capitalize on the power platform’s capabilities to improve their agility, scalability, efficiency, collaboration, and security while achieving their business goals and objectives.

What is Microsoft Power Platform? 

Microsoft Power is a unified platform that combines with other Microsoft platforms, such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Azure for analytics, design, and development. It empowers organizations to quickly automate and digitize their end-to-end business operations that deliver value to stakeholders and accelerate business growth. This powerful platform can be widely customized to adapt to other tools to create custom applications that fulfill the growing demands of modern business.  

Learn more about our Power Platform Capabilities.  

Steps for Effective Microsoft Power Platform Implementation 

#1: Identifying the Business Needs and Objectives 

Identifying the business needs and objectives helps to determine which platform components to implement and use according to the business objectives. Power platforms intend to accelerate automation by identifying the business problems that were previously solved manually.  

The proper definition of the existing problems makes them easier to resolve, which could save time, money, and resources. The potential pitfalls, such as complaints, gaps, and inefficiencies, must be rectified in the current work environment to make businesses remain competitive. 

Eventually, capturing the business needs will help companies define their business goals and plans by engaging key stakeholders, conducting deep research, and prioritizing requirements, allowing them to make better decisions, anticipate trends, and identify opportunities effectively.   

#2: Measuring Business Value: Align with KPIs and OKRs  

Power platform solutions focus on aligning with KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to achieve the company’s vision and strategic goals. KPIs aim to monitor overall performance, whereas OKRs set organizational goals and align with the team to measure the business values that drive significant impact and innovation. These metrics will be regularly tracked and analyzed to assess our progress and identify areas of improvement. 

As such, the power platform contributes to the organization’s success by evaluating the effectiveness of existing solutions, functions, and processes in terms of efficiency, cost, and performance. Most importantly, seeking feedback from stakeholders will catalyze modifying the existing business solutions to meet business needs better and exhibit a return on investment to stakeholders. 

#3: Establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) 

The Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) is a set of components and tools that helps organizations regulate maintenance workflows, reports, and best practices, ensuring organic growth and innovation while maintaining the necessary level of governance and control. 

It empowers organizations to develop a strategy for adopting the Microsoft Power Platform that comprises Power BI, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. It provides an intuitive, collaborative, and resilient platform that includes several low-code tools that help organizations create effective and flexible solutions.  

A CoE must be deliberately designed and customized by each organization based on their needs and preferences, which include geographical and organizational silos with the same business goals to share knowledge and success. 

A successful Center of Excellence is not only managed by tools alone but also focuses on people, communication, requirements, and processes. The CoE kit consists of clear rules, frameworks, and best practices, allowing individual developers to leverage the experience of experts. However, Microsoft Power Platform requires a mature investment strategy, considering the multiple aspects of governance, training, and support for numerous functions and roles involved across organizations.   

#4: Admin and Governance: Assigning Admins and Defining Roles and Responsibilities 

Assigning admins and defining their roles and responsibilities is an essential step towards successfully establishing CoE in the Power Platform. We must include the following roles and responsibilities while establishing the CoE:, 

• Microsoft Power Platform Admin Team: The admin team should be accountable for establishing an environment strategy, setting up data loss prevention (DLP) policies, and managing users, capacity, and licensing. Connectors, integration, and migration have been extensively used to make data available to developers. 

• Microsoft Power Platform Nurture Team: This team is entitled to nurture our community of makers to ensure the usage of tools the organization has already invested in to achieve the business goals by organizing various events, training, and hackathons. 

• Automation and Reusable Components: Microsoft Power Platform tools support extensive automation by approving licensing requests from end users for utilizing unused and highly used resources. It inherently adopts reusability across organizations by sharing standard templates and reusable components to get added benefits more quickly. 

#5: Establishing Low-Code Strategy using Power Platforms 

In the epoch of digital transformation, enterprises have started to leverage the incredible potential of low-code/no-code strategy, where automation is imperative. The paradigm shift towards low-code engineering ensures that the Microsoft Power Platform strategy is aligned with the organization’s goals. 

The low code platform paves the way for the automation of core repetitive tasks using drag-and-drop tools with templates, making developers focus on higher-value activities. It allows companies to rapidly build and deploy custom business applications in a modern agile environment without the need for technical expertise. 

Most notably, integrating a low-code strategy can significantly reduce the turnaround time for project development. This helps organizations drive new revenue and streamline the business operations that meet customer needs, which will automatically enhance customer satisfaction.  

Gartner predicted, “A rise in business technologists and a growing number of enterprise-wide hyper-automation and composable business initiatives will be the key drivers accelerating the adoption of low-code technologies through 2026.”  

It enables organizations to reach a high level of digital competency with concrete action plans, which makes them stay ahead of the curve. In a nutshell, understanding the methodologies, delivery models, frameworks, and organizational change management plans of Power Platforms is crucial while implementing a low-code strategy. Hence, we must equip ourselves with the latest tools and technologies to implement low-code strategies. 

#6: Executive Sponsorship 

Successfully adopting the Power platform always depends on acquiring executive sponsorship and leadership buy-in, especially in large organizations. It is essential to identify an executive sponsor by considering their roles and activities by applying top-down and bottom-up approaches. They have expertise in various use cases, such as formulating a strategic vision for Power Platform, prioritizing resources, staff allocation, fund approval, decision making, and expanding CoE.  

Interested in Harnessing the Power of Power Platform?   

Being a trusted Microsoft Gold Level Partner, our iLink Digital team of Power Apps developers has excelled in rapidly developing low-code to no-code business applications that help companies automate and improve their business processes with greater efficiency to achieve desired business outcomes. 

Here are some case studies you can explore showcasing our latest work in Power Platform:

• Digitizing Safety Assessments for a Renowned American Club
• Streamlining Program Management and Collaboration for a leading Automotive Company
• A Modernized IORS Solution for a Global Agriculture Corporation

If you want to leverage Power Apps for your company, connect with our experts today to embark on the journey of Microsoft Power Platform. 

Let’s talk!

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