Microsoft Power Platform Adoption Planning
Microsoft Power Platform Adoption Planning
Microsoft Power Platform Adoption Planning
Planning Workbook
The purpose of the deck is to help
What’s inside accelerate your adoption of Microsoft
Power Platform within your organization.
Envision Onboard Scale
Get started Champions Center of Excellence
Project team Community Adoption maturity
Executive Sponsorship Rewards and Recognition Operational Plan
Adoption strategy and vision Communication Plan Success tracking
Success Criteria Awareness Activity calendar
Resistance Management Ongoing Engagement
Readiness
Training strategy
Outline
3
Our Adoption Planning Workbook will guide you through the
adoption planning process
Assess
Assemble readiness Onboard
your team employees
Partner with your team Determine the overall
Tap into the technical organizational Plan the rollout cadence
to clearly outline Build awareness,
and business change readiness including based on early adopter
business strategy and deployment, training,
agents. Recruit multi- leadership alignment, pilot program,
key success metrics. and feedback
disciplinary teams of user groups, and Champion readiness,
Align business and collection into the plan
executive sponsors, technical, governance, and planned scope of
technical needs to to continuously drive
technical talent, core support, and feedback change.
maximize outcomes. engagement and usage.
stakeholders, change channels.
agents, and
champions. Define Build plan
strategy and
scenarios
Envision
Microsoft Power Platform enables everyone to
digitize their business processes. In this phase,
you will gather your initial team, define your
adoption scope, assess your readiness, and
capture what success looks like for your
organization.
Get started
By driving adoption of Microsoft Power Platform,
you can deliver an excellent user experience and
increased business value inside your company.
Driving adoption and cultivating a low code
culture is about more than implementing
technology features. Technology can assist an
organization in making the greatest impact, but
a healthy low code culture involves a lot of
considerations across the spectrum of people,
processes, and technology.
Our goal is to get you up and running quickly so
that you can begin your journey with Microsoft
Power Platform.
Assemble your team
We have identified key stakeholders who are
critical to a successful adoption effort.
Each stakeholder group has a specific role in the
implementation and should be engaged early
and often.
The next few pages outline the specific roles
these stakeholders will have in your adoption
process. Use them to identify key stakeholders
and others involved in the adoption effort.
Assemble your team
Any successful project begins by bringing the right team together. Your project stakeholders should include
representatives across your organization who have accountability for project success.
Success Owner Ensure the business goals are realized from the adoption process Any department [Enter Name Here]
Help evangelize Power Platform. Create a circle of influence and can feed back [Enter your Champions
Champions Multiple departments
to the Adoption team what works/what doesn't work. Lead here]
Manage and communicate training content about Power Platform – can be
Training Lead IT or other [Enter Name Here]
internal or external vendor
Department Leads Identify how specific departments will use the Power Platform and encourage Any department
[Enter Name Here]
(Stakeholders) engagement (management)
Corp Communications, IT or
Communication Lead Oversee company-wide communications about the Power Platform [Enter Name Here]
other
Responsible for establishing an environment strategy, setting up
Power Platform Admin Team data loss prevention (DLP) policies, and managing users, IT [Enter your Admin Lead
capacity, and licensing. They also make data available to makers through Here]
connectors, integration, or migration.
Organizes app-in-a-day events and hackathons, provides mentorship to
Power Platform Nurture Team Multiple departments [Enter your Nurture Lead
makers, ensures new makers get off to a good start, and generally evangelizes
Here]
the platform. Provide business change management.
Note: Though we recommend having each of these roles fulfilled, in smaller organizations some of these roles may be carried out by the same person.
Executive sponsor
When planning to advance the adoption of Power Platform, it's crucial to have To gain buy-in from your leadership
executive support. Having an executive sponsor is imperative because adopting team, demonstrate the impact of
Power Platform is far more than just a technology project. your Power Platform solutions,
share other
Although some successes can be achieved by a few determined individuals, you
customer success stories, or direct
will be in a better position when a senior leader is engaged, supportive, informed,
and available to assist with activities such as: them to the
Total Economic Impact report of Po
• Formulating a strategic vision and priorities for Power Platform and low-code wer Apps
• Leading by example by using Power Platform in a way that's consistent with , conducted by Forrester, which
adoption goals outlines the time, cost and
productivity savings of Power Apps.
• Allocating staffing and prioritizing resources
• Approving funding (for example, Power Apps Per User licenses or AI Builder
credits)
• Communicating announcements that are of critical importance
• Decision-making, particularly for strategic-level governance decisions
• Resistance resolution (for issues that cannot be resolved by operational or
tactical personnel)
• Supporting organizational changes (for example, creating or expanding the
Center of Excellence)
Get buy-in
Citizen developers will come from all parts of your organization and will
not traditionally sit in IT. As these people have “day jobs,” they will
report to people who will need to buy in to the transformation you are
bringing using Power Platform. You may need to empower people to
take time from their “day jobs” to be involved in making apps, flows, and
chatbots.
Consider how you will get executive buy-in, manager buy-in, and
individual buy-in. An effective way to gain buy-in is to highlight the
positive impact Power Platform could have for different stakeholders. For
example, you might show an executive projections for cost reductions, a
manager might be more motivated by the time that solution may save,
and an individual may be excited by the learning opportunity.
Culture change can take time, and it is important to address people’s
concerns and how it may impact their part of the organization both in
the short term and the long term.
Identify an executive sponsor
There are multiple ways to identify an executive sponsor.
Specific:
S Clear and unambiguous. Answering questions "What, why, who, and where?"
Measurable:
M Concrete, clearly demonstrating progress.
Achievable:
A Reasonable, not extreme.
Realistic:
R In line with the realities of the stakeholders.
Time related:
T Linked to a specific target date. Answering the question "when?"
Use these examples to define success benchmarks
Success measure Measurement method Example goal
Reduced operating costs Quantitative • Replace 20% of third-party apps by end of year
• Replace third-party tools with Power Platform • # of third-party applications retired • Replace 10% of legacy and on-prem apps
• Use Power Platform for development of custom solutions • # of legacy solutions retired • Reduce custom software development by 10%
• Avoid on-premise run costs by retiring legacy and on-prem • # of Power Platform solutions used • Use x number of Power Platform solutions in
solutions and replacing them with Power Platform solutions in production production
In what format? •Share success scorecard during meeting and post to Teams
channel after monthly meeting for access by all key stakeholders
•PowerPoint
Using which vehicles?
•Power BI
Resistance management
Resistance is normal
Microsoft Power Platform perceived as not a Show customer examples of customers who are using the Power Platform for
development tool (only for proof of concepts production and mission critical solutions. Learn More:
and demos) Power Platform Customer Stories
No progress in the adoption Get a leader to support the program. Increase communication plan.
Code-first developers are worried about their Share how developers can add value to low code development by creating APIs and
job security if other people become developers PCF components. Learn more: Fusion Development Approach
Address people resistance with communication
Common resistance themes Mitigation with communication
Show how Microsoft Power Platform adds value and helps them save time.
People don’t have time Create an organization wide program that encourages employees to participate.
Learn more: Find out how other organizations nurtured their citizen makers
Do show and Tell Sessions. Use an Innovation Backlog to manage a list of ideas.
People don’t know what to build Organize a hackathon to discover needs and problems. Show ideas of apps that
have been built to generate ideas. Learn more: Get inspired by real-world use cases
Reward and recognize for their hard work. Present plenty of opportunities and
People are not passionate, not warming up to
varied opportunities, lots of selections and ways to get involved. Showcase the
the idea, or don’t see the value
value and art of the possible on specific use cases.
Show how anyone can quickly and easily create an app or a flow. Learn more:
Microsoft Power Platform perceived as only for
Create a canvas app in Power Apps and
developers
Automate a business process with Power Automate
People are worried there will not be enough Include details on how the support services will operate and provide supporting
support content
Share details about training activities and link to supporting content. Work with a
People are worried there will not be sufficient
partner to offer hands-on training workshops internally. Attend a virtual
training for new ways of working
“in a day” training.
Ensure the business sponsorship through to managers is there and promote the
People don’t like change, they don’t want to
benefits of working in the new way. Provide information about how people can get
change. Period.
How may they resist? (optional)
Expected resistance Resistance management plans/ideas
o Example: People managers don’t understand the benefit of Power o Example: Provide managerial coaching for people managers to
Platform and won’t allow their reports to spend time on upskilling. embrace emerging platforms.
o Example: Align Power Platform strategy to the digital
transformation strategy of the organization.
Organizational readiness
Assess technical and
organizational readiness
Key factors that will tell you how ready your team members are for
the adoption of Power Platform
• Clear vision for the organization to adopt
• Clear vision for the individual to adopt
• Level of overall change
• Executive alignment
Think about a time when your organization adopted a new • Example: Moved file storage to the cloud two years ago using OneDrive.
technology. What made that adoption successful or not Employees shared that they knew ahead of time the change was coming
successful? and were told specifically how it would impact their role. In some cases,
the impact was minimal, which reduced anxiety.
How will Power Platform benefit your organization? How will Power Platform benefit employees?
• Example: Our workforce is using disconnected • Example: Our company strategy is to ensure
and often manual processes, legacy systems every employee is part of our digital
that are not available on mobile devices. Using transformation strategy. Using Power
Power Platform, we can digitize our processes Platform, now everyone can create the tools
and increase productivity, save costs, and they need to complete their daily tasks.
ensure employees have the data they need at
the time they need it.
Identify areas of alignment
To ensure that leaders demonstrate support, there must be alignment on key adoption goals, timelines, and
objectives. Use this worksheet to capture areas of alignment and misalignment and the implications of both.
• Example: Driving digital transformation, retiring legacy systems, and saving cost on
maintaining software has been a goal of IT and business units for a long time. All key
Executive alignment
leaders are on board with the decision to use Power Platform to achieve those goals.
• Example: Central IT functions have shared a fear of increased Shadow IT when business
functions can create their own technology solutions.
Executive misalignment
Reinforce
Make the training stick with reinforcement options such as on-
demand training, lunch & learn sessions, and new employee
training options.
Microsoft Power Platform in a day
workshops
Here’s how
Microsoft has created Power Platform in a day training courses. This
is a great for team members, whatever their role, who want to Experience how
extend their skills to learn how to create apps with Power Apps, Microsoft Power Platform can meet
chatbots with Power Virtual Agents or desktop flows with Power your business challenges quickly and
Automate. effectively
by attending a virtual, one-day traini
Once you have people in your team who have attended one of the ng workshop
in-person or virtual events, you could adapt the course materials to .
align with your organization and run them internally.
Remember, everyone in your organization is an expert in something. Or download the material for your
Teaching them to build Power Apps helps them harness their skills Power Platform experts to deliver the
into solutions that benefit the organization. training internally.
Build capability through varying methods
Ongoing
Core Team IT Preparation Business Groups
Engagement
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courses and learning paths available on Microsoft Learn help you arrive at
your goals faster, with more confidence and at your own pace.
Earn certifications to advance your career and show how you are keeping
pace with today’s technical requirements.
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Onboard
This section will help discover the ways you can
show leadership the business value of Microsoft
Power Platform.
Build a sustainable Champions:
Customer stories:
Prolific app maker ignites low code revolution at Schlumberger
H&M Group enables citizen development at scale
Arm enables low-code adoption with a thriving Center of Excellence
Heathrow Airport inspires employee engagement with Microsoft Pow
er Apps
Champions community
Set Team
Product
At the heart of growth is a community, a place for Owner
Leaders who want to create a digital culture will put apps developed by their colleagues that solve
a framework in place for the community inside their problems similar to their own.”
organization to break down geographic and – Claes Söderström, Cross Delivery Coordinator,
organizational silos. H&M Group
Community- finding champions
If you have Microsoft 365 in your organization, it’s likely some Take a look
individuals already have discovered Power Apps through Use the tenant-level analytics in
exploration and Power Apps popping up in Microsoft Teams, the Power Platform Admin Center
SharePoint, and OneDrive. to identify your top makers.
Even without organic adoption, it’s likely you already have a
good idea of who your champions will be. They are your Excel, Or go further by installing the
Access, and SharePoint whizzes; or maybe they’re the CoE Starter Kit and get deeper
troublemakers pushing the boundaries; or the ones who are first insights into your organizations
in line when there’s something new to learn. They question, they Power Platform usage.
query, they encourage.
Train those people. Make them champions and help them train Learn more
others — champions aren't only passionate about what they do
Create a champions program and
but are also excited to evangelize and help their peers to learn
support Power Platform Champion
more effective ways of working. s in your organization
Rewards and recognition
Best practices for rewards and recognition
• The individual Champion who answered the most • Highlight in internal Power Platform newsletter
questions in the internal community. or intranet site
Champion of the week • The individual Champion who created the most • Gift card
apps or flows that are used for production • ‘Thank you’ email from manager or Executive
scenarios. Sponsor
• Power Apps Premium licenses for a year
• The individual solution that solved the best
Solution of the week business process, saved the most money, or
increased productivity.
Your theme
Communication and awareness
Awareness matters
Engagement events
Kick-off event with Executive Sponsors
Hackathons
Training events, such as App in a Day or App in an Hour
Show & Tell sessions to showcase successful solutions
Virtual and in-person drop-in sessions for employees to learn
more
Encourage
ongoing engagement
Increase Power Platform adoption over time with ongoing
awareness and training activity.
• Create a Yammer or Teams group to continue the
conversation on best practices and new features.
Envisioning workshop
Drop-in sessions
Scale
To achieve organization-wide change, seek out problems
that you can solve, not only at scale but also at speed.
In this phase you’ll establish your Center of Excellence,
creating the heart of a thriving digital culture. You will also
understand the platform capabilities to create thousands of
apps that solve myriad business challenges in a sustainable
and secure way.
Creating a Center of Excellence
• Pockets of success and • Initial Power Platform • Standardizing • Standard processes for • Organization has
experimentation with controls implemented repeatable practice. managing and proven the capabilities
Power Platform. by a central team. • Achieving measurable monitoring Power of Power Platform to
• No strategy or • Start to identify success to digitally Platform. transform mission
governance approach. applications that are transform their • Power Platform critical capabilities.
• Apps are team-based broadly used in the organization. capabilities are being • Established
and supported by the organization. • Defined Power used to transform the community of
makers. • These organizations Platform Center of business broadly and experts.
• Organisation sees the sometimes believe that Excellence team. used for enterprise- • Fusion teams enable
potential of a strategic the use of the Power • Transformation may critical apps and legacy capabilities and
investment, but there Platform is running still reflect organic integrations. modern cloud
is no clear path “out of control.” growth. • Platform Champions architecture to be used
forward. have established easily.
channels.
Digital guardrails
Here’s a few things you’ll be looking at:
A Center of Excellence enabling
development of thousands of • Automate the creation of environments for developers by building a
apps at scale will require more request and approval process for them to follow.
robust guardrails than at earlier • Implement Application Lifecycle Management by using Azure
stages. DevOps Build Tools or GitHub Actions.
Initially, your focus was on setting • Automate the clean-up of unused environments, apps, and flows.
up and securing the platform • Identify critical and production applications based on usage, and
through establishing an promote them to appropriate staged environments
environment strategy, setting up (development/test/production) to ensure changes made in
DLP policies, and ensuring development do not break end-users in production.
appropriate security roles are
• Establish an automated process to get more information from makers
assigned.
about their apps, such as business justification, impact of an outage,
As you scale, you’ll look at and risk assessment to allow you to get a better picture of what your
automating some manual tasks makers are building.
and driving actions based on • Continue to measure the business value your makers and apps add,
insights you gather from your
to showcase the impact Power Platform is adding to your
adoption.
organization.
Support processes
Support systems for the apps, including Many organizations use either a SharePoint Hub site or
training and knowledge bases, should be Teams to share resources, best practices and learnings
implemented. End-user training for the apps with their makers. In addition to training resources, be
being made should be designed and sure to also share your success stories–highlight app
implemented. makers and their stories, as well as the business value
You should start to see a change in the way they have added through their apps to inspire other
people look at streamlining how they work, makers to do the same.
how to use apps to improve their jobs and Using the Power Platform Admin Center, IT pros can
create a better working experience. monitor and provide guidance to app makers; they
Think about the progression of your makers, can support the apps that are published for use by other
and be sure to offer beginner, intermediate people in the organization.
and advanced training—this could be through Your Admin will want to use the insights you get through
leveraging content from the fantastic external monitoring your usage to drive action–such as
community and curating link lists with blog identifying critical, orphaned, or unused resources.
posts and YouTube videos, as well as hosting
internal training events to run
App in a day, Advanced App in a day or App i
n an hour
Skills
development
Growing your pool of talented people should be front Look for people with skills and strengths in the following roles:
and center at this point in your journey.
Citizen developers continue to bring their day-to-day experience of how their job is
You will have observed that the citizen developers of
done.
yesterday become the technologists of tomorrow. As
their appetite to learn grows, they will become the Code-first developers will design advanced interfaces using PCF as well as building
leaders and trainers of your future citizen developers. complex relationships or integrations with other applications, when the out-of-the-
Some may go on to specialize in specific areas on box limits have been reached and the app needs to be extended.
Power Platform, learning excellent technical skills that
enable more advanced problem solving across your Architects will understand the strategy that the organization wants to achieve as
organization. well as using the best technology to achieve organizational outcomes. They will
understand the big picture from a technology perspective and will provide guidance
Across the whole team, talent gaps need to be and technical leadership.
identified and filled. Formal training programs should
be implemented. You need to identify what skills are QA & Testing needs to be part of scaling app creation; quality and reliability will be
required to solve the challenges your organization is expected.
facing.
IT Pros and Admins lead the governance, compliance, and supportability of apps
across the organization.
Fusion teams
Fusion development with Power Platform is about combining the Achieve more together.
worlds of the citizen developer, the code-first developer, and the other
parties instrumental in building and using applications to further the
objectives of the business. A citizen developer can express the business
need quickly by building an app, and work with a professional
developer to "fill in the gaps.“
Power Platform enables citizen developers to quickly innovate and
experiment with ways to improve their business processes. Using Power
Fusion Dev Playbook
Platform, citizen developers who understand the business requirements
can quickly put together a solution, with a minimum of coding effort.
But there will always be more complex situations that can't be satisfied
using only low-code.
For example, your organization might have existing systems and
databases with which the app needs to interact and for which no
connector is currently available. There might be additional business
logic that needs to be enforced to ensure that data remains consistent. Transform your business applications with f
An app might need to implement a complex, dynamic business flow. usion development
Fusion teams work together to create these solutions.
Track success measures and
maker adoption
Distribute surveys to gather data about your makers’ knowledge of
and satisfaction with the new Power Platform services. The results
will help you determine how successful the rollout has been and get
you thinking about how to incorporate this feedback into
actionable next steps.
No
3. How satisfied are you with the internal Power Platform adoption
Stream responses directly into Power BI
program?
4. What else would you like to see as part of our Power Platform
adoption program?
Operation plan
Team touchpoints
Recommended meetings to host during the program for everyone involved stay updated on the progress:
Frequency Activities
• Keep updated with latest Microsoft Power Platform news
Daily
• Respond to questions from Citizen Developers
• Welcome new members
• Host Show & Tell sessions
Weekly • Host Q&A Sessions or Lunch & Learns
• Post to your organization’s Power Platform community to keep users engaged: e.g., tips and
tricks, use case examples, how to, praise etc.
• Create and update video content/ how to guides and training content.
• Create success stories to post and showcase
• Post about Power Platform updates in your Community: e.g., MS Teams/ Yammer/ Intranet
Monthly • Host monthly engagement event: e.g., innovation session, hackathon with specific departments
etc.
• Extend knowledge with User Group meetup: e.g., invite an external speaker
• Reward program: praise and reward citizen developers
• Monthly meetings with Power Platform Admin Team to review adoption progress and new
Yearly features
• Quarterly meetings with Leadership to show adoption progress
Managing Creating a calendar for the team with these activities can assist in
keeping everyone on track.
team activities There will be two type of calendars:
with a calendar • Technical calendar with activities that the Power Platform
Admin Team will be responsible for managing
• Adoption calendar for the Adoption Team to keep the
community engaged
Deploy Center of
Review COE Reports
Excellence Updates
Power Platform on Microsoft Learn Get Certified Go further with the CoE Starter Kit
Power Platform on Microsoft Docs Power Platform Community Power Platform Adoption