A Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE), as talked about in this blog post, refers to an entity that is responsible for nurturing the growth of Power Apps and Power Automate in their organization, while applying the right administrative guardrails.
The responsibilities of a CoE typically fall into these four buckets:
Administration & Governance
Nurture
Support
Operations
A CoE is designed to drive innovation and improvement, and through its central function can break down geographic and organizational silos in order to bring together like minded people with similar business goals to share knowledge and success, whilst at the same time providing standards, consistency, and governance to the organization.
As the talk lays out, a CoE could start off quite simple with a single individual using the provided tools and best practices to get a view into Power Apps activity in their organization, or may grow into a more mature investment with multiple functions and roles, such as in the case of Chevron, where they’ve established a 20+ person CoE to manage multiple aspects of governance, training, support and automated app deployment across the organization.
We would encourage the reader to understand where they are in their adoption journey and invest accordingly. A key principle is to get clear about why you’re setting up a CoE, what you aim to accomplish and the business outcomes you hope to achieve. Then get started, and learn and evolve along the way. For many, the CoE is a first step in fostering greater creativity and innovation across the organization by empowering business units to digitize and automate their business processes, while maintaining the necessary level of central oversight and governance. In its fullness, a CoE typically encompasses all the functions mentioned above, in some form.
Center of Excellence Starter Kit
The Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit is a collection of templatized best practices, that are designed to help organizations get started with tools needed to set up a CoE. The kit focuses on both Administration and Governance function, as well as Nurture functions of the CoE.
The download link for the CoE package, including setup instructions, documentation and source code can be found at the end of this blog post.
Before we dig into CoE Starter Kit features, we did want to take a slight detour to explain our philosophy around rolling out Admin & Governance features and point out where the CoE Starter Kit fits in that context.