Mike is a Principal Consultant for ThreeWill. He has a passion for solving problems, most notably through products or platforms. He has almost 20 years of experience in product development and leadership, using the latest and greatest technologies, including open source technologies.
On your digital employee experience journey with Microsoft and the 365 ecosystems, you’re going to encounter an opportunity to adopt the Power Platform and grow its use within your organization. Should you jump at this chance?
Part of the Journey
In our world of hybrid work, it is a necessity for your organization to embark on a digital employee experience journey. You want your physical workplace to have all the necessities and processes in place so your people can both “get their work done” but also thrive within your organization. Your digital workplace needs to do the same.
As your organization and your people mature, hopefully, they will find new and exciting ways to contribute and innovate. If you’ve chosen Microsoft 365 as the basis for your digital workplace and employee experience, then you will inevitably encounter the Power Platform. When this moment comes, you will be faced with a choice: to embrace or ignore.
Who does this benefit and how?
This decision to adopt Power Platform can be seen through many different lenses, but I want to focus on these 3 key beneficiaries:
- Me
- My Team
- The Organization
As we look at these beneficiaries, I will break it down into 2 ways we can measure the success of adoption:
- The innovation or improvement it can provide
- The ROI it might provide
How will it benefit me?
In this case, we are talking about the individual or citizen developer: your people.
Innovation/Improvement
Replace repetitive tasks with flows or apps to improve my focus on what really matters.
Quantitative ROI
Time saved per day vs Time spent to make a flow or app.
How will it benefit my team?
Here we are looking at the leader or decision-maker of a team or group or department/division.
Innovation/Improvement
Replace regular, and potentially involved, manual business operations with a flow or app to create new efficiencies and potential to focus on brand new opportunities and ideas.
Quantitative ROI
Time saved in a year vs Time spent to make a solution.
How does this benefit the organization?
Here we want to look at the benefits as perceived from the “C suite” perspective, assuming the previous 2 barriers have been surpassed.
Innovation/Improvement
Replacing all these various manuals and/or outdated tasks creates space for new innovations and new ideas.
Quantitative ROI
Either cutting costs or improving efficiencies and creating new opportunities for growth.
Are these benefits real?
So, there can be benefits seen all the way up through the organization. But are these benefits real? I certainly think so and here at ThreeWill, we have seen this evidence at all stages. But what does Microsoft have to say about it? They have studied it enough to be able to put their learnings into a Power Platform ROI Calculator. According to them, the return-on-investment calculator is an interactive model based on The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Power Platform, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. As you dig in, you’ll see that this is something that has been analyzed deeply and these benefits aren’t just “pie in the sky”. These have real dollars associated with them and we know that innovation can sometimes be priceless.
You should take the time to review the entirety of the study and what was found, but I want to point out just the quantified benefits:
- Citizen developer projects completed using low-code/no-code tools cost less.
- The organizations replaced third-party business applications and business intelligence tools with Power Platform.
- Solutions built with Power Platform made users of all types more efficient.
- Power Platform delivered improved business outcomes across many dimensions.
Where to start?
When getting started with Power Platform, you may be inclined to just “turn it off” for now. Here’s what I would say on the matter: your instinct is not wrong, but perhaps it doesn’t need to be that drastic. Here’s the reality: Microsoft has made the citizen developer their #1 priority and if that creates more hassle for IT, so be it. Thankfully, there are some things that can be done early and quickly so that you don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Now there is more than just one thing you can do to get started and I have plenty to say on the matter. Additionally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend talking to ThreeWill first to make sure you get started in the right way. But here’s my first clue for you, if you truly are just getting started with the Power Platform and feel like adoption is something you want: Visibility.
Governance without Analytics is just your opinion
Remember that you can’t govern what you can’t see. And if you can’t govern or monitor it, how will you help people grow with it? So your first order of business will be to set yourself up for success with better visibility and a process that can respond and work with this new level of insight. This will allow you to feel empowered to open the flood gates. This is a service offering at ThreeWill: a Power Platform governance workshop, where we will work with you to help set up a Microsoft Center of Excellence and the implied necessary process, along with a step-by-step road map of the next steps for success.
CONTACT THREEWILL TO SCHEDULE YOUR POWER PLATFORM GOVERNANCE WORKSHOP TODAY!
