Power Platform | How to: Business Value Assessment

It might be due to the all over Power Platform news around Microsoft Build 2021 and more developers onboarding – cause anyone can be a developer and if you don´t think so, watch this – I was texted and emailed several times, if I could help on how to get started with building a business value assessment around Power Platform, assuming your company is following the below approach of creating collaborative applications while pro- and citizen devs unite as Fusion Teams.

Well, of course this hasn´t been the first time I´ve seen this question upcoming and while there´s already a ton of guidance outside on how to govern and secure the power platform or how to get started creating your first app, chatbot or flow, there´s less information floating around on how to get started on building a business value assessment – for example in terms of internally convincing business decision makers to become exec sponsors and help growing the platform idea.

So let me start by outlining the three major pillars you should build your business value assessement around. No surprise, you might be already familiar to those, as they are not unique or specific to Power Platform itself. There´re more pillars possible, but those are the main three that come up across all industries.

Above visual outlines the three main pillars to start with and now let me jump into each one of them and shed some light in terms of measurements.

1. Reduce total cost of ownership

When it´s up to measurements you typically should look for some KPIs that fit into this bucket and help you building the business case around. In terms of the first pillar, those could be a reduction of effort on both the app development as well as on process workflow development. You may ask, what around data visualization or chat assistant creation?

Feel free to take them into account as well. You know Power BI and Power Virtual Agents are family members of the Power Platform, so there´s nothing wrong to define KPIs for them as well. Additionally, you should think of reduction of IT maintenance in general (as you´re signing up of SaaS offering – where there´s typically less effort spent in terms of maintenance, which is done by the service vendor instead). And another KPI could be the retirement of third-party software that has been used previously to enable such functionality and in future no longer will be needed.

While it might be an easy task to get to the KPIs, many are still not familiar in terms of what´s the benefit calculation for this. So how does a formula look like that can be used. So let´s take a closer look on the effort spend for development.

Impact = number of development projects * average development costs per project * savings (%)

Business Value Assessor

I guess the first parameter is not an issue for you to get to, but how to get to an average of development costs and how to get to savings? Lucky you, regarding Power Apps for instance, there´s a study out by Forrester, available here for download and you can get through the second and third parameter by reading through the study. In any other case, estimating the average development costs per project using traditional tools and a mix of internal and external resources should be something the budget owner of IT projects should know about.

2. Increase performance and efficiency

This second pillar is way more industry specific in terms of the KPIs that you may want to setup and follow here for measurement. If you´re customer facing, you might want to take a look at increasing customer retention or increasing up- and cross-sell. You may want in general look at improve profit margin.

In manufacturing, you might take a closer look on reducing unplanned machine downtime, decrease scrap and rework or reduce labor costs. As said, all of them are way more industry focused and therefore look different. That being said, the Impact formula looks very different for all of them, though in the end it is an impact number in a currency of your choice.

3. Faster time to value

The typical KPI measurement for this is improve time to market. That means you´re talking about the reduced time building business applications or process flows + allowing rapid prototyping including a proof of concept or any other demonstrator. It also takes into account being supportive in terms of rapidly changing business needs, because being able to innovate quickly and release more frequently in general provides you a huge competitive advantage.

So the impact formula for this looks a little like a modified one of the first given example – take a look

Impact = number of developed applications per year * average development costs * average project IT ROI / average ROI IT duration in months * time savings (in month)

Business Value Assessor

Wrapping up today´s topic – I hope that those insights get you started with a business value assessment. You´re equipped with the three main pillars now, you got examples for some typical KPI measurements and if you need more or more industry specific, I am pretty sure that any search engine will help you with more inspiration. And in case you still struggle, don´t hesitate to ask your Microsoft Team to help you with this task. I am pretty sure they will help you or connect with a partner who could help with this.

Comments, Feedback? Again, let me know using the known technologies. Until then, …