Power Platform | Adoption Framework cont’d

In my previous article, I was talking about a quick reference guide on adoption and what companies – specifically Center of Excellence (CoE) Teams – care about. Today, let me take another closer look around this and why an internal accelerator program can be helpful and drive success to unleash the full business outcomes when using low code platforms such as Power Platform.

In an ideal situation, using low-code tools inside your organization should be a self-service. But as we all know, citizen development is about creating apps, flows, chatbots, custom connectors and many more. If you follow above visual that I am using in my workshops, you see that those activities are surrounded by two important layers.

#1 Security & Compliance – Governance – Business Value layer

It shouldn´t be a surprise that this layer exists, as it is true for any other application or product that is used in a company or even for private use-cases. Meaning, you should be in a safe environment when using those apps, flows, etc. as well as you should be in a secure and compliant environment when creating such. In many companies this is regulated by so called Governance teams. Dedicated teams who ensure that security settings are in place and compliance is met based on company or industry requirements. What´s less often talked about, but of course also in place is to measure business value. Just purchasing a software and then not using the licenses is a waste of money, I think we can all agree on this one.

#2 Application Lifecycle Management layer

The second layer surrounding low-code is well known in the traditional software development ecosystem, but remains true for low-code or rapid application development systems like Power Platform as well. Depending on the fact of companies operating with indoor software development or only using outdoor software integrator services, the amount of pillars might vary. Nevertheless, those are valid and working for low-code as well. Therefore, you see me adding some typical tasks around those phases. For instance, before starting a process optimization I would ensure that citizen developers and pro-developers following a common strategy and vision. Because of companies operating international, but teams setup being local, I´ve added another task which is to identify and share use-cases. Think of a use-case catalog, that would help to identify if teams already working on a specific process or if they might have already developed and deployed a solution for this.

In this case, you might step into the phase of change management and provide your user feedback which becomes part of the next release and an improvement of the flow, app, chatbot, etc.

Instead, if it´s a complete new idea, you may want to collect it in an innovation backlog first to find possible team members who like to cooperate and work together with you on this. You may want to cross-check in terms of collecting votings, if it´s worth your effort as well. And of course in this phase of requirements & innovation backlog you may consider operating with design thinking workshops and/or tech-talks to collaborate and work easier on your identified processes/use-cases.

Hopefully, I could outline the strong relationship between the typical tasks around application lifecycle management and building an adoption accelerator program, as I outlined in previous article. The accelerator program ensures those tasks can be easily followed. Furthermore, as responsibilities are pre-defined each developer – citizen or pro-developer – does know who is doing what. Companies, introducing low-code tools or platforms outperformed their competitors as analysts said. We shouldn´t forget that they also introduced or extended their Center of Excellence to ensure that business value and business outcomes are generated from this corp.-wide initiative.

For those being new, let me re-add the link to official Microsoft documentation around this topic. Though a lot to read, you´ll find valuable content that helps you orchestrating your plan to success. Until then, …