Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit

The Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit is a collection of components and tools that are designed to help you get started with developing a strategy for adopting and supporting Microsoft Power Platform. It focuses on Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Copilot Studio.

More details can be found here: Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Kit – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn.

The following are some of the key features of the CoE Starter Kit which we can use to audit your current Power Platform usage and put governance measures in place for reduced shadow IT, increased adoption and greater adherence to best practices.

Inventory components

A core component of the CoE starter kit are the Inventory components. These gather an inventory of the environments, Power Apps, Power Automate flows and Copilot Studio chatbotsr. This inventory is generated by exporting from Power Platform Admin Center to Azure Data Lake, or by cloud flows which trawl your tenant. The first approach is currently in preview, and therefore we recommend to most clients to take the cloud flow approach.

The inventory data is then available in the provided Power BI report.

It is at this stage we see the most challenges – deploying the CoE Starter Kit Inventory components is relatively straightforward, with well-documented steps on Microsoft Learn and community walkthroughs. However, deploying the CoE Starter Kit is just a technical step. The crux is that the output then needs reviewing and interpretation, which is where powerpac.ai can help.

We will deploy the CoE Starter Kit, then review and interpret the results for you. We will provide a clear, actionable report covering the steps you should take to secure the platform and put processes in place to help your organisation continue to benefit from the Power Platform in a more governed and compliant way.

Environment Request components

Another set of core components of the CoE Starter Kit are the environment request components. These are used to automate the request, approval, and creation of environments and data loss prevention (DLP) policies.

Business Value Toolkit

Understanding and communicating the value of solutions created with the Power Platform is key to achieving success and maximizing return on investment. The Business Value Toolkit is a collection of sample apps and processes designed to to capture and communicate the value of Power Platform solutions. By guiding app owners through a structured storytelling process, enhanced by AI to refine the narrative and assess its impact on organizational strategic goals, the toolkit helps turn raw insights into compelling success stories that highlight the true impact of their solutions.

Governance components

The CoE Starter Kit Governance components provide functionality to overlay governance on existing and new resources created within your tenant, such as:

• Compliance processes – functionality to send compliance detail request emails for apps and chatbots which meet certain thresholds. For example, a Copilot Studio chatbot launched more than 50 times but with no business justification details.
• Inactivity processes – Checks for apps that haven’t been modified or launched in the last six months (configurable). Asks the app owner whether the app can be deleted.
• Microsoft Teams governance – requests justification when a new Dataverse for Teams (D4T) environment is created. It can clean up D4T environments meeting certain requirements.
• Orphaned resource clean-up – On a daily basis, this collects all the orphaned objects in the tenant. It attempts to associate them with the manager of the former owner. It then sends a Teams message to each impacted manager.
• App Quarantine processes – processes to quarantine apps where compliance details have been requested but not supplied.

Nurture components

Nurture components are provided to engage with makers and foster an internal community. They help you share best practices and templates, and onboard new makers. Nurture components are not widely adopted within our client base. They often overlap with resources and procedures already available. For example the Video Hub is superfluous to suggesting some preferred YouTube channels, and formal training is often scheduled through a preferred training partner.

Innovation backlog components

The innovation backlog components of the CoE Starter Kit are there to provide a mechanism to allow users to record ideas for apps and flows which need building. The app helps break this down in terms of complexity versus value. In our experience, most clients either already have a very specific app in mind, or have an existing tool for capturing ideas.