Driving 600% Growth with Power Platforms Governance Framework

Challenges

QuadReal adopted Microsoft Power Platform knowing they would eventually need a governance model or a playbook to ensure that all security requirements were met. After two years’ worth of Power Platform solution development, data security, solution support, and solution change management, it was time for QuadReal to turn to industry experts.

Due to the limited guidance with the usage of Power Platform, it quickly became apparent to QuadReal’s team that their existing ungoverned solution would not suffice long-term. The organization required a solution that allowed them to solve business problems with Power Platforms while complying with IT and business compliance regulations.

Background

QuadReal realized that without a governance and playbook approach to Power Platform solutions, issues related to data risk and solution stability would worsen over time. The criteria that they required in the new solution were (1) that they took into consideration best practices for the secure design and (2) managed users, group security, and permissions roles. Lastly, the need to monitor compliance, data auditing, and measure adoption usage within the organization.

They required a Power Platform strategy partner, not just a Power Platform development partner to succeed. They reached out to Microsoft for a recommended Power Platform strategy partner, and Microsoft introduced Zelusit.

Journey

Zelusit demonstrated deep knowledge and excellence with Power Platform strategy, governance, playbook, and methodology (covering the Power Platform capability gap QuadReal had). Our existing Power Platform IP, such as Zelusit’s Power Platform “Use Case Assessment” Toolkit and Zelusit’s “Power Platform Playbook” template, was also accelerating and aligned. Therefore, QuadReal decided to work with Zelusit to address their Power Platform strategic needs and follow a three-step outline to plan and develop the solution.

1. First, Zelusit visioned what proper governance for Power Platform entails. Allowing the team to outline the importance of roles and responsibilities, application life cycle, risks and controls, environment strategy, security strategy, best practices, application life cycles, and delivered QuadReal aligned governance artifacts.
2. Zelusit then performed in-depth discovery to understand the current Power Platform state and challenges, then completed a gap analysis between the current state and future good-governance state.
3. Next, Zelusit defined an action plan to take QuadReal from its current to its future state.

Zelusit provided QuadReal with a blueprint on a Power Platform governance that best fit the company’s environment and culture. QuadReal is a growing company that wanted to ensure they remain a nimble group while still providing the guardrails to their citizen developers in the organizations. The governance framework helped achieve:

• A Power Platform Playbook tailored to QuadReal’s needs based on various workshops with the business users. The playbook covered development practices, security practices, and how to manage Power platform environments successfully.
• A standardized SDLC approach with “delivery hubs” to ensure non-production and production followed standard development practice.
• A consolidation of environments – QuadReal had 17 environments reduced to 9 environments.
• A “Personal Productivity” environment enables all end-users to explore and innovate on the Power Platform.
• The Power Platform Center of Excellence toolkit was installed and configured to enable Power Users to monitor all environments. This also provides reporting to ensure best practices are followed, and QuadReal remains compliant from a licensing perspective.
• Data Loss Prevention policy templates were developed and implemented. This was an activity where connectors on the Power Platform we categorized as Business, Non-Business and Blocked. Once categorized, the policies were implemented and the respective environment levels to ensure business data was being used correctly and unwanted connectors were not being used.
• An assessment toolkit was delivered to help the intake of new solutions. The toolkit is a series of questions and analyses that will output the best approach for developing the solution, along with best practices and licensing estimates.

Impact

QuadReal moved from a high data risk, unstable solution state to a well-governed, growth-oriented alternative. They can now move forward while trusting the efficacy and growing enterprise adoption of Microsoft Power Platform. The organization is expected to move from 15 Power Platform solutions to 100 Power Platform solutions next year.

QuadReal is on-track to deliver solutions while transitioning into the delivery hub approach. The governance framework was executed with quick wins that brought value for both the power users and the business users. Within a couple of weeks of executing the action plan, the COE toolkit already provided insights into how many applications were already deployed and being used, and new citizen developers were discovered.

QuadReal now has a robust and manageable environment that is scalable for many solutions to come simultaneously, ensuring security and governance at the forefront without overbearing processes interrupting the rapid development the Power Platform brings. The personal productivity environment will enable end-users to innovate and change the way their teams work and their departments and, ultimately, QuadReal work.