There’s gold buried in your data.
But frankly, businesses using outdated and disparate processes aren’t going to be able to mine it.
This is the problem that our Microsoft Power Platform training and consulting services solve.
‘Power Platform’ is the umbrella name for six Microsoft Cloud services: Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Pages and Copilot in Power Platform.
Together, this suite of tools helps companies digitally transform their businesses, automate cumbersome manual processes and leverage meaningful data insights.
Used correctly, it gives non-technical business users – often referred to as ‘makers’ or ‘citizen developers’ – the ability to build apps, automate processes and present data in useful visual formats.
At Intersys, we often encounter customers who express interest in Power Platform, but find it challenging to understand the tools. This is at least partly due to Power Platform’s ever-evolving nature and the constantly changing terminology used by Microsoft.
Our mission with our Power Platform training and consulting services is to help customers unlock and realise the full value of the tools and become self-sufficient using them, to drive innovation and efficiency within their organisations.
If you are lucky enough to have plenty of Citizen Developers then you may have an altogether different (governance) challenge which we can help with too.
To really illustrate what our Power Platform consulting services can do, we’re handing over to Garry Pope, our Power Platform Consulting Lead.
Garry’s recently worked on a Power Platform framework for a healthcare client. In this detailed post, he talks through a project that transformed the company’s processes and use of data and, crucially, put the power to innovate with Power Platform firmly in its team’s hands.
The Requirement
Typically, customers using our Power Platform consulting services want solutions for specific problems.
However, this brief was unique. Our customer wanted to explore the potential of Microsoft’s Power Platform without investing significant resources or a large budget.
We suggested four aspects of the platform that would set them up for success. These were:
- Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
- Data Loss Prevention policy (DLP)
- Centre of Excellence (CoE)
- Process Automation
Our primary requirement was to collaborate with our customer, ensuring they were hands-on and learnt from us, rather than us doing it alone. This approach was designed to empower them to support themselves once the project concluded.
The project timeframe was limited to just 22 days.
Typically, Power Platform projects, such as process automation, can take several days, weeks or even months to complete. Given that we had four major tasks to deliver, we decided to break down each task into its own self-contained project.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
What is it?
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the process of overseeing an application’s journey from its initial concept to its eventual retirement. For example, consider someone who wants to create a timesheet tracking app. They would follow these steps: build the app, test it, release it, maintain it, extend its functionality and finally, retire it when it’s no longer needed.
Without an ALM process, managing the app can become chaotic, leading to numerous potential issues such as lack of updates, security vulnerabilities and difficulties in scaling or maintaining the app.
The solution
An environment strategy was essential to enable the safe and secure release of components, such as Power Apps or Power Automate Flows, while integrating these releases into their change process. We guided our customer in creating three Power Platform environments: ‘Development’, ‘Test’, and ‘Production’. Each environment was secured with a dedicated Microsoft 365 Group.
Given that this was the customer’s first experience with an environment strategy for the Power Platform, we opted for a straightforward approach. As part of our Power Platform training and consulting services, we educated them on all aspects of an environment, from security roles and business units to releasing changes via solutions. We conducted numerous tests to ensure they were comfortable with creating and maintaining environments, performing software releases and rolling them back if necessary.
Finally, we documented the processes through a video recording, allowing them to refer to the documentation whenever needed.
The benefits
There are many benefits to an ALM process in the Power Platform. One of the most significant is addressing the issue where a critical Power Automate Flow, for example, created by a maker, becomes suspended if the maker leaves the company.
With the ALM process in place, the flow can be exported from the maker’s environment, such as the default environment, and moved into the ALM’s development, test and production environments. It can then be owned by a service account user, which remains with the company, ensuring the flow continues to run without interruption. Also, any testing performed in the test environment doesn’t impact the production environment.
Here are several key advantages to having an ALM:
- Important and critical components pass through the correct process of development, testing and releasing to production.
- Environments are established with the correct security and access.
- Fewer chances of incidents occurring.
- The foundations are in place to extend the ALM process such as using Power Platform Pipelines or Azure DevOps Pipelines, or even add additional environments such as a ‘QA’ or ‘Pre-prod environments’.
Data Loss Prevention Policy (DLP)
What is it?
The Power Platform empowers makers with the ability to use connectors. These connectors are prebuilt APIs that enable makers to connect to various applications and systems, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, ServiceNow, SAP, Office 365 Outlook, SharePoint, YouTube, DocuSign and thousands more, all without writing a single line of code.
This is the essence of no-code development.
Additionally, the Power Platform Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy allows companies to manage the use of these connectors. They can decide which connectors should be blocked, which ones can be used, which connectors can be used together, and even restrict specific actions within the connectors.
For example, a company might allow makers to create records in ServiceNow but prevent them from deleting records.
The problem
In many companies that have not yet adopted the Power Platform, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies typically fall into one of two categories.
The first category is the absence of a policy altogether. In this scenario, no policy has been created, and all connectors are available to all makers, subject only to licensing restrictions. This is often referred to as the ‘Wild West’ state.
The second category is a highly restrictive policy where all blockable connectors are blocked, including any new connectors that are introduced. All Power Platform environments are governed by this stringent policy. This approach is often taken by diligent security teams as a precaution, especially when the Power Platform is not yet well-established. This is the approach our customer adopted before they asked about our Power Platform development services.
However, having a single, highly restrictive policy can lead to several issues. For instance, if a specific connector needs to be unblocked for a critical process, unblocking it makes it available to everyone, not just the intended maker, environment or process. Additionally, blocking all connectors stifles creativity and innovation. Makers who encounter blocked connectors may become discouraged and revert to manual processes instead of pursuing automation.
The solution
Collaborating with the security team, we introduced flexibility into their existing DLP policy by implementing a second policy.
This new policy granted access to specific environments and connectors, while excluding these environments from the original restrictive policy. This adjustment was essential for our Centre of Excellence task, which will be detailed below. This change demonstrated the potential of DLP policy functionality within the Power Platform, ensuring it works for everyone while maintaining robust security.
We documented the processes through a video recording, allowing the client to refer to the documentation whenever needed.
The benefits
- Enhanced flexibility, enabling broader adoption of the Power Platform.
- Assurance the Power Platform is being utilised correctly.
- Increased understanding of the Power Platform within the security team.
Centre of Excellence (CoE)
What is it?
Microsoft’s Centre of Excellence (CoE) is developed by a dedicated team at Microsoft to help companies monitor, audit, govern and promote the Power Platform.
It provides valuable insights into who created various components, which connectors and data sources were used, and with whom these components, such as Power Apps, were shared.
The problem
The Power Platform offers significant capabilities to non-technology professionals, which can often instil fear in companies and deter them from adopting it.
This worry stems from the concept of ‘shadow IT’, where individuals, teams or departments manage their own IT solutions without involving the IT department. For example, a marketing team might purchase and manage a marketing CRM independently.
In a similar scenario, a maker creates a Power Automate Flow used by thousands daily, unbeknownst to the IT team… until something goes wrong, at which point it becomes IT’s problem.
Despite our customer not promoting the Power Platform and enforcing the strictest DLP policy, they still had over twenty environments, and hundreds of Power Apps and Power Automate Flows, within their company.
With such a high number of components, it’s likely that some are critical to the business. Without the Centre of Excellence, it’s nearly impossible to identify these critical or important components, essentially resulting in shadow IT on a grand scale.
The solution
We collaborated with our customer to establish an environment for the Centre of Excellence (CoE), as outlined in the ALM above.
The first Centre of Excellence module we installed was the core components, which included a collection of Power Apps, Power Automate Flows and Power BI reports.
The Power Automate Flows gather data on everything built within the Power Platform. This data is then visualised in various Power Apps, enabling our customer to audit each app, flow, chatbot etc, to determine their criticality to the business.
They can then migrate important items through their newly developed ALM process, enhancing governance, security, testing and maintenance.
Additionally, we discussed and documented a scoring system to categorise and score each app, flow, chatbot etc. This system provides an overall view of all created items, allowing for more informed decisions on what is truly critical.
One issue we encountered was related to the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy. When creating our environment for the CoE, we couldn’t add all the necessary connectors due to the DLP policy restrictions.
We had to modify the DLP policy, which immediately affected existing apps and flows. For example, the RSS feed connector required for the CoE was blocked by the DLP policy. We had to make a change. If the CoE had already been installed, we could have used the DLP Impact Analysis app to simulate changes to the DLP policy and assess their impact on existing apps and flows.
Without this tool, we were uncertain about the potential impact of our changes. Fortunately, due to the strict DLP policy, we were able to make the change with high confidence that it wouldn’t cause any issues. This scenario highlights one of the advantages of having the CoE: it simplifies DLP policy changes.
The benefits
- Provide assurance that the Power Platform is being tracked and monitored.
- Visualise the current use of the Power Platform.
- Detect and flag junk components, such as ‘Test App 4’, for potential removal to maintain a clean and efficient platform.
- Identify important and critical components, like ‘Companywide Payroll App’, for future governance and management.
- Identify key individuals who have built components, fostering a community of champions.
- Improve security by discovering and addressing potential vulnerabilities.
Process Automation
What is it?
The Power Platform is an exceptional tool for digitising paper-based processes and eliminating or significantly reducing manual tasks.
The problem
The work we did for the ALM, DLP, and CoE provided our customer with a solid foundation for implementing the Power Platform, though it was primarily IT-focused.
After completing this, we began assisting two makers, also known as citizen developers, in automating two of their processes. Both makers, who work in the finance department, were non-technical and each had a process they wanted to automate.
At Intersys, we believe our Power Platform consulting and training services should empower our customers, rather than just delivering the process.
We aimed to train the two finance employees to build solutions tailored to their business requirements. We believe this approach is better for three reasons:
- The customer can self-serve and resolve issues independently, without needing to pay for additional support.
- The customer knows their process and data better than anyone. So why should they try and convey this, for us to spend two weeks building it, only to discover an important part was not discussed? Much better for the customer to remember this information as they build.
- Once they learn how to automate a process, they can apply this knowledge to automate other processes.
We embarked on ten days of hands-on meetings, shadowing our two makers from the finance team and helping them build their automations.
The first requirement was to automate a multistep approval process and maintain the audit history. The process involved numerous emails, phone calls and chasing, and sometimes even printing out a document for a physical signature.
Additionally, the process owner, one of the finance makers, was frequently contacted for updates on the document’s status in the approval process. On a bad month, this consumed approximately 20 hours of the maker’s time.
The second requirement was similar in nature, involving an approval process that was manual, but had different nuances and set deadlines.
The solution
Each maker developed an advanced flow, even though they were new to Power Automate. These flows were secure, idempotent and included error handling.
They utilised variables, parallel branching, loops, conditions, HTTP SharePoint calls, delays, trigger conditions, scopes and environment variables. Multiple connectors such as Microsoft Teams, Office 365 Outlook, SharePoint and Approvals were integrated. The flow was of course created within a Power Platform solution.
Not only did these flows streamline manual processes, but the most significant benefit was that the makers learned to use Power Automate at a deep level.
This enabled them to troubleshoot issues, make necessary changes and, most importantly, gain the skills to automate other processes – all within just ten days!
Benefits
- Learn how to build Power Automate Flows securely and efficiently.
- Troubleshoot and resolve issues that arise in the flow.
- Expand and enhance the flow as needed.
- Apply knowledge to automate additional processes.
- Educate colleagues on building their own flows.
- Demonstrate the potential and capabilities of Power Automate.
Conclusion
In just 22 days, my team, in partnership with our customer, established the Power Platform. Their achievements included:
- Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Process: developed a secure and efficient ALM process to streamline the release of changes.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Policy: extended the DLP policy to be both flexible and robust, ensuring comprehensive security across all scenarios.
- Centre of Excellence (CoE) Module: implemented the first CoE module, providing an overview of Power Platform usage and identifying critical components.
- Maker Education and Automation: trained two makers to automate two manual processes, empowering them to develop, enhance, maintain and own their solutions, all without writing a single line of code.
This implementation demonstrates just a fraction of what’s possible with the Power Platform and highlights how much can be accomplished in a short period.
If you’d like to discuss more about how your company can achieve similar results with our Power Platform training services, please get in touch.