If your Power Platform program is growing, you’ve felt this tension.
You need to move fast, but without breaking things.
You want to innovate, but without compromising security or compliance.
For Admin Leads, the priority is safeguarding the tenant: enforcing governance, protecting data, and maintaining a strong compliance posture.
For Delivery Leads, the mission is speed. They’re focused on delivering value quickly without getting bogged down in approvals or red tape.
This is where a Center of Excellence (CoE) makes the difference.
Not as a slow-moving committee.
Not as the “no” team.
But as an enablement engine that helps teams deliver faster, safer, and more consistently at scale.
What a Power Platform Center of Excellence Actually Is
In plain language, a Power Platform center of excellence is a small set of capabilities that help your organization scale Power Platform adoption without sacrificing quality, security, or delivery speed.
It is nota single org chart.
It is nota static team.
It is a way of working.
At its best, it creates three outcomes:
Standards that speed up delivery
- The right way becomes the easy way
- People stop reinventing the wheel
Support that reduces rework
- Templates, office hours, reusable assets
- Clear escalation paths when something gets stuck
Adoption that stays governed
- Templates, office hours, reusable assets
- Clear escalation paths when something gets stuck
Keep it grounded in Power Platform reality:
- Environments (where solutions live and how you separate work safely)
- Data policies and connectors (how you prevent accidental risk)
- Solutions and release discipline (how you promote changes without production chaos)
- Application lifecycle management (how you build, test, and release reliably)
Pick the Model That Fits: Three Common Center of Excellence Shapes
Most teams land in one of these models. None is universally “best.” The right one depends on maturity, risk, and how much demand is coming from the business.
Model 1: Centralized
Everything routes through one core team.
- Works when
- You need fast stabilization
- Maturity is low and risk is high
- You are standardizing from chaos
- Watch-outs
- “Buried in more work” risk is real
- The business disengages if the center becomes a gate
Model 2: Federated
A small core sets standards and guardrails. Delivery happens within departments.
- Works when
- Demand is high and distributed
- You need speed close to the business
- You already have capable builders in departments
- Watch-outs
- Quality drifts unless you invest in shared assets and enforceable guardrails
- Departments will duplicate work unless reuse is intentionally designed
Model 3: Hub-and-Spoke
A hub defines standards, guardrails, and shared services. Spokes deliver inside business areas.
- Works when
- You want both speed and consistency
- You can support a small central enablement function
- You need a clear path from “local need” to “enterprise-safe”
If you can only staff one person, start closer to centralized, but bias toward self-service assets.
If you already have builders embedded in departments, move toward hub-and-spoke as you mature.
When a Center of Excellence Is the Right Move (Signs it’s time)
A center of excellence is often the right move when:
- Your user base is expanding (more people are building and shipping)
- Your inventory of apps and flows is growing across departments
- Risk is rising (data sprawl, inconsistent standards, unclear ownership)
- Delivery is slowing due to rework, support load, and “who owns this?” confusion
If you’re early, you don’t have to “go big” to start.
You can start lightweight and still be serious: a few guardrails, a few reusable assets, and a way to see what is happening in your tenant.
The Foundation: Governance and Enablement Must Stay in Balance
The fastest way to create a support nightmare is enablement without guardrails.
I like to frame it this way:
Enablement is empowerment for builders.
Governance is protection for the organization.
The operating principle you’re aiming for is simple:
“Yes, and here’s how to do it safely.”
Governance is not there to slow people down.
Governance is there to make the safe path the fast path.
What too much governance looks like
- Long approval cycles
- Fear-driven policy making
- Delivery teams route around the process
What too much enablement looks like
- Rapid growth and a support crisis later
- Inconsistent security practices
- Technical debt that blocks future scale
The balance is guardrails, templates, and clear lanes for different types of solutions.
Here’s the mindset shift that makes the balance real without turning you into a bureaucracy.
You are not trying to control every build; you are trying to reduce surprises.
If you do that, you get both outcomes:
- Delivery moves faster because people know the path.
- Governance gets stronger because the path is actually used.
A practical way to think about it:
- Create lanes, not a single line
- Low-risk work should have a fast path
- High-risk work should have tighter guardrails and clearer checkpoints
- Make the safe defaults invisible
- Templates, naming, environment patterns, and connector rules should guide people before they ever need to ask you
- Turn “approval” into “enablement” where possible
- Instead of “come ask,” aim for “here’s the standard, here’s the example, here’s how to do it safely”
- Keep your guardrails explainable
- If you can’t explain why a rule exists, you will spend your time defending it
- Use friction as a signal
- When smart people keep going around the process, it usually means the process needs work
The goal is not perfect governance on day one, rather, a system where you can say “yes” more often, without waking up to a bigger mess next month.
A Practical Build Sequence (High-level, no rigid timeline)
This is not a strict timeline.It’s a way to make delivery repeatable so you can ship without guessing what “safe” means this week.
- The order matters because each phase reduces chaos in the next one.
- If environments are messy, intake becomes political.
If intake is messy, build work becomes rework. - If build is messy, support becomes your full-time job.
This is where you decide where work happens, and where it is not allowed to happen.
When the environment boundaries are clear, you can move faster because you are not renegotiating the basics every time.
Microsoft’s guidance is basically this: most organizations start in the default environment, and that’s fine for early productivity work. As adoption grows, the default environment is not where you want “everything forever.”
You need a strategy that routes makers into the right place so governance and security can be applied consistently, without you manually policing every new app and flow.
Develop a tenant environment strategy to adopt Power Platform at scale
Example in real life:
you stop building directly in production.
This is where you make work visible and defensible.
It’s how you say yes without saying yes to everything.
This is also where you protect your future self.
When you validate the request up front, you avoid building the wrong thing quickly. When you prioritize in the open, you stop getting cornered by whoever escalates the loudest.
Example in real life:
requests stop arriving in five different places, and you can explain why you said yes to one thing and not another.
This is the delivery lifecycle.
It’s how you stop “shipping” from meaning “hoping.”
The goal is not to slow delivery down.
The goal is to make delivery repeatable so you can ship twice without paying twice.
When this phase is consistent, you get fewer late-night surprises and fewer “who changed what?” conversations.
Example in real life:
releases become boring, which is the goal.
Support is how you keep trust when something breaks, and how you keep today’s success from turning into next month’s resentment.
Reporting and evangelization are how you keep your wins from disappearing.
They help people find what already exists, follow the safe patterns, and stop rebuilding the same solution three different ways.
If your wins stay invisible, demand doesn’t get easier. It gets louder. And you stay buried.
If you are serious about day-one visibility, consider implementing thePower Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit early.
Resources:
Microsoft overview/documentation for the Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit
GitHub repository for the Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit
Direct install/download instructions for the Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit
Data loss prevention policies and connector governance
Application lifecycle management with solutions and environment promotion patterns
Common Pitfalls (And what happens next when you hit them)
Pitfall: Your center of excellence becomes the place everything gets stuck
- Impact: people go around you, inconsistent builds proliferate, trust erodes, and you get buried in more work
- What to do instead: create self-service standards and templates so people can move without asking permission
Pitfall: Governance without enablement
- Impact: builders hide work, off-path solutions increase, standards lose legitimacy
- What to do instead: say yes with guardrails and support, then tighten based on what you learn
Pitfall: Too much process
- Impact: cycle time grows, delivery slows, adoption fragments
- What to do instead: keep the process lightweight and prove value with every step
Pitfall: Ignoring off-path building
- Impact: you lose visibility and learn too late, security and support risk rises
- What to do instead: design a safe on-ramp back into the program and fix the root cause
Pitfall: Not evangelizing wins
- Impact: leadership assumes nothing is changing, departments duplicate work, adoption stalls
- What to do instead: publish the wins, the reusable assets, and the “how we did it safely” story
Quick wins that build momentum
When you are building from scratch, return on investment is not the only metric that matters.
Momentum matters.
Here are quick wins that do not corner you:
- Do not shy away from small projects
- Pick work you can complete and show
- Build credibility with delivered outcomes
- Reserve time to take care of home
- Target about 20 percent of capacity for internal systems and reusable assets
- Intake improvements, templates, catalog, standards automation
- Identify and nurture champions
- Find the builders in the business who want a path
- Give them guardrails, training, and the right access
- They will become your best evangelists and your best opportunity pipeline
If you want a simple next step for this month:
- Pick one guardrail to tighten
- Pick one enablement asset to ship
The bottom line
A Power Platform center of excellence is not about control. It is about repeatable delivery at scale.
If it slows delivery, people will route around it.
If it enables safe speed, it becomes the foundation that lets you scale without burning out.
If you want to talk through what this looks like in your world, feel free to email me.
