“What does it take to truly be sucessful within the Power Platform?”

– Almost Everyone

Here we are again. Talking about this Microsoft Power Platform thingy. Touted as a low/no code solution, organizations are finding out that it’s hardly that especially when seeking full scale enterprise integration. Licensing isn’t cheap, and can quickly sprawl. Initial tool meet and greet for most users feels to them like they have been dropped out of a plane Bear Grylls style with little to no knowledge about survival. Delivering at speed and scale can be a challenge even at only personal productivity levels.

So what’s the secret? Creating a framework of 5 connected points that help support the weight of the platform all while cultivating an inviting environment for the admin and citizen to thrive. Let’s get automating!

1. Assessment and Planning

Over and over again, I see this theme occurring with organizations looking to embrace the Power Platform. Crawl, Walk, Run. What a fantastic strategy! The problem? Most just want to skip over all the hard stuff and go straight to running a marathon. I have never seen this work out well. Full integration of this platform is a journey and you must treat it as such. It’s extremely critical to discover and understand how your environment should be constructed to fit your needs, measure success, and to follow general best practices. All of this starts at the assessment and strategic planning phase. In a perfect world, you would do this before rolling out platform components, but we all know this rarely happens. Never fear, it’s NEVER too late to backpedal to gain some understanding of your current environment and long term vision.

I cannot overstress this step enough. Make sure you know your environment intimately and understand the mission critical success factors. This is your first and one of the most important points. You’ve been warned.

2. Implementing Best Practices and COE Tools

With great power comes great responsibility. The Power Platform is no exception. To build bones of adamantium, a solid backbone of internal governance, compliance, and user management must be established. The backing is yet other point to ensure that we have the infrastructure in place to support our citizens and admins, and help avoid the pitfalls associated with rogue development and security risks.

Remember, this one will force you to understand it and respect it one way or another. Better to establish all these goodies before you get too far down the rabbit hole. Reconfiguring workflows, processes, and solutions is much harder down the road when you have a good amount of content already deployed. Been there done that, and it’s a lot like Michael Bay movies since the Rock…not pretty.

Like Point 1: Assessment and Planning, you are still very much trying to strengthen the foundation. We are still walking here after all.

You’re just starting to hit your stride. While you may have a vision and plan from various assessments and analysis (and you should), we cant be in too much of a hurry to get to where we are going, or that’s when the bottom falls out. Understanding may take 2 months and implementing may take 4. This is a journey, and each step you take will either add or subtract to your ROI. This brings us to our next point.

3. PICK Value Opportunities

More than likely you have a lot of ideas and more and more incoming each day. If not, go back to point 1 and start grinding on some more planning. Sometimes reviewing what others have done in this space helps the creativity juices flow. I know it can be hard to jump right into the idea generation factory cold. So go get some inspiration.

Anyway, you will get to the point where your backlog gets to be a bit full…hopefully. At that time, the organization will be faced with choosing and prioritizing. Point 3, is about understanding potential value and priority. If you are unfamiliar with the PICK process head on over to The PICK process. In summary, we are categorizing opportunities into the following: Possible, Implement, Challenge, and Kill. This doesn’t tell us what to do, but it gives us more context and understanding.

We can do even better if we add in some parameters about resources gained vs spent. I explain some of the common variables that organizations used to determine this value in The Automation Workflow, but this can truly be applied to any development within the Platform. Remember, you determined most of these factors and variables that could be used for evaluating success in Point 1: planning and assessment. If it’s not dollars or time, then what is it? You decide. Make it work for you. I’ve used the following:

• Estimate of Investment (hrs)
• Estimate of Daily Savings (hrs)
• Investment (Capitol)
• Savings (Capitol)
• Blue Dollars Savings
• People Impact
• People Impact Value
• ROI (Return on Investment)
• Difficulty
• Value
• PICK Value

You may have other items of interest, but as long as it adds context and understanding then you’ve hit the nail on the head. Speaking of doing that, we are now starting to get down to the real nitty-gritty:

4. Tracking and Evaluating True ROI over time

So if you have made it this far, give yourself a pat on the back. This journey isn’t an easy one and it’s not a quick one at that. However, you’ll get 10x return on your investment if you just take your time building the proper checkpoints. Many times over I seen some stellar evaluations of opportunities with tons of great details. Really setting themselves up for success, but after the solution has been deployed it’s never again tracked or evaluated. Point 4 marks the importance of follow-up and tracking with all operations within the Platform.

Don’t forget predicted ROI is different than actual. It’s so important to create a 360 degree feedback loop with questions to boot. What is the actual ROI? What did the process do really well? What could be improved to yield a better ROI? It’s important to understand the value the Platform is delivering over time and if need be reassess and pivot. It’s not uncommon to hit a couple foul balls before you hit that grand slam, and business use cases are constantly changing. Don’t be afraid of results and adjust accordingly. Hey, at least Power BI can help.

5. Empower Your Citizens

How do you really capitalize on your Power Platform stake? Well you’ve made it this far, now you just have to preach the gospel. Your final job is to bring the good news to the masses. How? Full on Power Platform adoption. Don’t wait for the end-user to ask about the tool. Bring the tools to them. Train them, offer workshops and hackathons, build out gamification to incentivize creation of processes that not only enhances personal productivity, but enhances the entire enterprise. Build a community of champions and warriors that live in the Platform and advocate for its value. From day 1 onboarding make the Power Platform a part of the company’s DNA and set the cadence for the citizen developer drum right from the start. Offer ongoing support and resources so that your humans know they have your support and sponsorship.

Risk it for the Biscuit

In closing, if you really want to excel in this space you have to take a bit of risk. A good friend of mine often says “Risk it for the Biscuit”. You already spent or plan to spend some money on the APPROPRIATE licenses, but it will be 100% useless if you don’t put those dollars to work. The real ROI comes from the building out the solution the right way. Growing up, I would see my Grandfather with stacks and stacks of mail-in sweepstakes entry forms piled-high. Over and over I would repeat “You know, you’ll never win one of those things”. He would reply, “Well, I do know one thing, if I don’t play at all I wont win”. In his case, it was probably all sixes and sevens either way, but not with the Power Platform. Doing it the right way and investing resources is the only way to see the return you are looking to receive. Be willing to pay 100k for the user enablement you need, or the implementation of governance. If I could invest 500k over the course of a year, and then in the 2nd year and thereafter get 3 million in return, welp I’d do it over and over.