In today’s post we’ll take a side track away from technical topics and look at how you can build an internal Power Platform community of makers in your own organisation! This post will give you a few tips and resources to making this easier!
Falling over at… governance
So the first thing I want to talk about is good ol’ governance 😉
Now… as much as I love the topic of admin & governance when it comes to implementing Power Platform and driving its adoption in the right way in an organisation, we have to take a careful approach to this which means that users don’t hit brick walls as soon as they try to interact with what were putting in front of them, causing them to not want to get involved or adopt the technology at all.
So, when it comes to governance, it’s important to ensure we don’t just take approaches of ‘lets lock it all down’, or lets only let people use the tiniest slice of the pie. Instead, its wise to take an approach of looking at each individual element with an attitude of ‘I want my users to be able to do this’ and then, if there are great reasons as to why them doing ‘that thing’ might cause issues, then we can look at whether pushing that out or giving them that much capability is the best idea.
So, the main tip here, is don’t get crazy hung up over governance and slap brick walls infront of everything… chances are by doing this you won’t find it easy to build a successful internal community in your organisation.
Handling encounters of governed features
So, lets say theres something you’ve implemented a governance style policy on. It might be necessary! But, lets not just leave users confused about why they can’t do something. It’s important to let our makers and users know what they can and can’t do with tools that they might have heard about online and from within the wider community. Be sure to document your governance strategy and share this with your users and makers in an easy to understand format!
One example of something you might do, is you might provide contextual error content when using something like limit sharing with Managed Environments… check this out!
CoE Starter Kit
If you’re looking to create a Centre of Excellence and an internal community of Power Platform makers at your organisation, you might look to the CoE starter kit as a starting point to creating this at your org.
The CoE Starter kit has a feature where it finds all of the makers in your organisation starting to interact with Power Platform or who heavily interact with it, and it adds them to a team where you can share resources and tips to empower your organisation’s makers!
This might be a great tool for you to use if you’re unsure of how to approach delivering content on Power Platform to people in your organisation. This gets you the people who’re already interested, now you just have to deliver content and empower those existing makers to achieve great things!
Reaching a wider audience
The tip of using CoE to reach your makers might be great for you, or you might want to reach a wider audience than the people who’ve already clicked that button that says ‘Power Apps’ or ‘Power Automate’.
So in this case, you might want to build a Power Platform Hub into your existing modern employee communications platform or Intranet!
You can check out this template and guidance from Microsoft on how to be successful in doing this – Create an internal Microsoft Power Platform hub – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
Identifying champions to drive your community
One last thing you might consider doing to ensure you create a successful community in your organisation, is to identify champions who’re incredibly enthusiastic about your technology space, in this case Power Platform, and have them lead community initiatives in your organisation such as internal community calls, tip’s n trick’s Teams posts or SharePoint News blogs.
By having people driving this that are really enthusiastic about the technology, you’re more likely to create a much bigger impact
I hope this post helped to get you started with a few ways to build your internal community! Let me know how your community building goes in the comments 🙂