Power Platform | The missed CoE Health check

A beneficial part of customers‘ Power Platform adoption journey sometimes leads to a revisit after a while, talking and sharing thoughts and learnings from the past months. For me in person, it´s always an opportunity to hear exclusive from „how-to´s?“, „lessons learned“ and also a welcome proof-check if content shared has been understood and could be helpful in terms of designing an implementation. Recently, there was one of those days again. A customer phoned me if I would have some time for a short check up as they may have identified an issue in their strategy and wanted my thoughts on this. Well, my answer was an „Of course, yes. Happy to help.„

From this and other conversations, sharing with yours the above visual to outline the challenge. I called it „The missed CoE Health check opportunity“, as I´ve seen customers widely following best-practices they found on the internet, working for other companies and by adopting it 1:1, expected those to work for them fine as well. The visual shows:

A wished-for-situation

Companies starting their Power Platform journey did their homework, found about a CoE team needs to be established. So their IT teams started to implement a Governance and Environment story around it, expected user growth rate to be fully controlled by them assigning licenses, control creation of environments, assets and them setting up DLP policies, blocking connectors (mainly premium), … and wished for the best.

Well, time proofed them wrong in terms of Makers demand didn´t grow in conjunction with their Governance steps implementation. Sometimes, adoption rate even falls short or got stuck on a certain level. I tend to call this situation „the break-up with creativity„. So what happened in this case? Let me provide an example, you may be familiar with:

Think back of your childhood. You might have growing up with Lego bricks. When your parents bought yours the first Lego, it was an exciting time following the construction manual and building the model. You then started playing with it for quite a while, but then some day it became unattractive. You left it in a corner, box or somewhere and you almost forgot about it. Deconstructing the model and build something new was almost impossible, as the amount of Lego bricks given with that model, didn´t left that much room for something else to build – in other words you were blocked.

Requesting further demand wasn´t a real option as well. Yes, you saw some more Lego models insight stores, but pricing went up massively and personal allowance didn´t left room for buying it. When asking your parents it was them saying you can put it on your birthdays or x-mas wishlist and maybe, … you know that story. It didn´t worked out well or the way you expected.

AS-IS-situation

Another common situation I see customers running into, is the implementation of a Center of Excellence, following best-practices, but at some point in time the Makers‘ growth rate stucks. There´s no „further demand“ coming from business and therefore the situation is somewhat in a frozen status. IT says there´s nothing to do, Business says there´s nothing to do, Procurement says there´s nothing to do. Only the C-Level is asking where is the retun on invest for all this, can´t we save some more money?

When I ask business employees, they mainly complain about the „complex administrative monster“ it became for them requesting a license from IT to allow them building and running their projects. They complain about missing initiatives to skill-up internally, learn and sharing their knowledge with co-workers. And after them being on a personal up-skill learning experience for a while investing their private time (not work time), them seeing their company not really investing into this (them), they opted-out, off to the next.

When asking procurement, they complain about not receiving a mandate to negotiate for any licenses as business doesn´t come-up with concrete demand.

The IT Teams replied – we´ve already provided our Makers all the options available with given current licensing (Microsoft 365, partially some Power Platform premium licenses). We reduced the platform to be compliant with our current licensing and we also reduced the amount of usage to the level needed for saving us money, as the CIO asked us to search for. You really can´t say our Governance strategy became somewhat a Firewall or a point of no return as we followed best-practices.

Well, what is it what we’re all talking about then? Instead of a business enablement tool (creativity mode) with high rated return-on-invest, it became a tool of no big business impact (resignation mode). Maybe we should retire it, to save even more money.

Does this situation reminds you of the example I provided you earlier with the Lego bricks?

Myself asking yours

What would have been the situation here. Yours as a child given some more Lego models you´ve build over the course of time. With more models you´ve been given, you were able to deconstruct and reconstruct objects based on provided opportunities with given Lego bricks. But then some day, you no longer played with it. It lost attraction. Then there was this advertisement given a new model coming out with a new Lego brick that would allow for constructing something completely new.

Since you couldn´t really play with it, you couldn´t estimate your demand for it. Since it wasn´t cheap at all, you couldn´t ask for buying it first and since there was no trial option, you were stuck in current situation. You were left open again with the options of putting it on your wishlist.

You then forgot about it and after a while your Mom or Dad asked yours if you shouldn´t sell it to somebody else, since you´re no longer playing with it. At least this would be an option for getting back some money for it. Sounds familiar?

But wouldn´t there be other options of fostering a culture of more creativity, than just following construction manuals building models with Lego bricks? What would be, if those bricks allow for being deconstructed and reconstructed it any way your imagination allows for? Wouldn´t that keep your interest or level of attraction almost at a high-rate? I hear yours praying, „Free up all Makers, allow for using any connectors„, … you name it.

Ideal situation

In an almost ideal situation, the Governance and Center of Excellence implementation is ahead of the game, motivating, inspiring and driving the adoption of Power Platform. Kind of if your grandma or grandpa when visiting them always gifted yours some more small Lego toyset. What did they used?

Oberservation, or think of it as Analytics like shown in above visual. Reports from the CoE Starter Kit Power BI dashboard, that allows your CoE team to inspect what´s ongoing, identify trends and be pro-active (ahead) in terms of fostering a culture of controlled creativity.

What I mean by this? Analytics or observation is key to CoE Teams success. It shouldn´t be exclusive to IT teams for using reports only to control usage and adjust Governance. Neither it is to inspect only of what your Makers are doing (otherwise your works council may kick-in).

Think back of the Lego bricks example I provided. Shutting things down in the hope of it being „under control“ can always lead to an opposite result expected. The negative one being, it leading to a non-attractive object, no longer or less frequently used or seen as an opportunity and therefore hard to measure benefits of over the course of time. This results in bypassing those who came up with the idea of guardrails on everything.

Then, a side-push was given by someone who observed carefully instead, watching for opportunities and impact on development. So it was the grandparents here, who helped to unlock the situation. So you may ask, what it means for achieving an ideal situation?

Establishing a CoE team and following a Governance strategy isn´t enough to hope for high adoption rates, growing numbers of users and increasing return on invest. Especially, if CoE teams consists of members of IT only. It is a mix of Business and IT folks that needs to join the CoE Team party. A CoE team is about observation and being pro-active on trends – simply being ahead of the game.

Wrap-up

Well, it wasn´t an easy time a couple of years ago to implement a good governance strategy, build a Center of Excellence or adjust an existing-one to adopt low-code. Today, it´s much easier to find content, best-practices shared from pioneers, early adopters and those willing to share their key-learnings for others to avoid stepping into those pitfalls.

Those landing pages which allows starters to consider their options first prior implementing them, modifying and adjusting their IT strategy to foster a culture of controlled creativity (BTW: Some call it controlled Shadow IT).

I think the important part is to inject „points of control“ – ask yourself if your Governance story needs adjustments or changes. Learn something new about latest improvements around granular action control and find new ways to accelerate innovation. Same as your Makers start building something new, motivate your CoE team to measure their success, implementing a culture of feedback loops between Business-, CoE- and IT DevOps teams that allows for pro-active adjustments.

Be reminded that the person playing with the Lego bricks, won´t start turning to you and asking for more naturally. When they finished playing with what they´ve been given, they´re finished. Instead, they high-likely turn away, off to find the next, where they´re not blocked to imagine pursuing their improvements with. It´s up to yours to help providing guidance on that path. Every voice should be heard. A DevOps team shouldn´t be called out as a CoE team. A CoE team is much more than this, and you can learn about it from here.

Oh, I almost forgot to share: The customer conversation ended up in an analysis like shared in above visual – middle graph. The team forgot to ask business for feedback of what improvements could be introduced to foster the culture of creativity. After they started a short survey internally, they figured out what was missed and could provide feedback ot IT DevOps team to inject additions to their Governance strategy. Some of it could already be found as out of the box capabilities, they weren´t aware of. What I brought with me to the customer meeting – A Lego brick model for them to acknowledge and solve their issue.

#NeverStopLearning – Until, then…