Microsoft Power Platform Centre of Excellence (CoE)

A Power Platform Centre of Excellence (CoE) is the team, standards and tooling an organisation puts in place to govern, monitor and support how people use Power Apps, Power Automate, Copilot Studio and the rest of the Power Platform. It gives you a single view of what has been built and who owns it, and sets the rules that let people keep building without creating security or compliance problems.

The Microsoft Power Platform lets people with no coding background build apps, automate processes and now create AI agents. That is the point of it, and adoption can move quickly, but at enterprise scale apps, flows and agents sprawl across environments very fast, and a CoE is how you keep that under control. For a good example of what the platform can do, see how CalMac used the Power Platform to track and manage defects across their fleet.

What is a Power Platform Centre of Excellence?

A CoE is a central function rather than a product. It is usually a small team, made up of platform admins, a few experienced makers and someone from the business, supported by a wider network of champions in different departments. Between them they:

• set the standards for how apps, flows and agents are built, named, shared and documented
• manage environments and data policies so business data stays where it should
• monitor what is being built, how much it is used and who owns it
• train and support makers, and share what has worked across teams
• decide when a solution has become important enough to need proper support and lifecycle management

Why do you need a Centre of Excellence for the Power Platform?

Because the platform is easy to use, people start building straight away, which is good, but without some structure you end up with hundreds of apps and flows in the default environment, business processes running under the account of someone who left last year, and connectors moving data between systems that nobody approved. A CoE gives you:

• one view of all Power Platform resources across the organisation, including apps, flows and Copilot Studio agents
• consistency in how things are built, which makes them easier to support and hand over
• clear ownership, so every business-critical app or flow has someone accountable for it
• control over data, through data policies that decide which connectors can be used together
• a way to spot good ideas in one team and reuse them elsewhere

The arrival of AI agents makes this more pressing. An agent built in Copilot Studio can answer questions from SharePoint and carry out actions through Power Automate, so the same questions about who built it, what data it can see and who looks after it now apply to agents as well as apps.

What happened to the CoE Starter Kit?

For several years Microsoft's CoE Starter Kit was the usual starting point. It was a free, open-source set of solutions that collected inventory data, ran compliance processes and provided Power BI dashboards. Microsoft has since stopped actively maintaining it, and its core capabilities are now built into the Power Platform admin center:

• Inventory gives a view of the apps, flows and agents created across your tenant
• Usage tracks adoption and shows the most used resources and their owners
• Monitor tracks the operational health of heavily used resources
• Actions highlights risks and recommendations, such as apps without a valid owner

The kit can still be installed, but it will not get new features and Microsoft no longer reviews issues raised against it. For a new CoE we would start with the admin center and Managed Environments, and only add custom tooling where there is a specific gap.

What are Managed Environments?

Managed Environments are a set of governance features you switch on for individual environments. They include sharing limits, which stop an app being shared with more people than you allow before it happens rather than after, weekly usage digests for admins, welcome content for makers, solution checker enforcement and pipelines for moving solutions between development, test and production. They do have licensing implications, so it is worth checking what your users are licensed for before switching them on everywhere.

How do you set up a Power Platform Centre of Excellence?

Start with why you want one and what it needs to achieve, because a CoE that exists to stop people building things will just push them towards spreadsheets and unmanaged tools. From there, the steps we would normally follow are:

1. review what already exists in your tenant, including environments, apps, flows, agents and their owners
2. agree an environment strategy, including what the default environment is for and where business-critical solutions live
3. put data policies in place for each environment
4. switch on Managed Environments where they make sense and set up the admin center reporting
5. define the CoE team, the champion network and how makers ask for help
6. agree how a solution moves from a personal experiment to something the business supports

Our Power Platform strategy work covers this, and once the CoE is running we can provide ongoing support through our Power Platform managed service so your team is not doing it alone.

Frequently asked questions

Is the CoE Starter Kit still supported?

No. Microsoft no longer actively maintains the CoE Starter Kit. It is still available to install, but its core capabilities are now in the Power Platform admin center through Inventory, Usage, Monitor and Actions, which is where Microsoft recommends you start.

How big does a Centre of Excellence need to be?

It depends on how widely the platform is used. In a smaller organisation it might be two or three people spending part of their week on it, while a large enterprise with thousands of makers may have a dedicated team plus a champion in each department.

Does a CoE cover Copilot Studio agents?

It should. Agents are created in Power Platform environments and appear in the admin center inventory alongside apps and flows, so the same data policies, ownership rules and monitoring should apply to them.

If you would like help setting up or reviewing a Centre of Excellence, get in touch with us.