Project
Power Platform ALM & governance rollout for an enterprise
From 300 ungoverned apps to a managed platform with a documented path to production.
- Power Platform
- Dataverse
- Azure DevOps
- Managed Environments
- CoE Toolkit
Problem#
Six years of organic adoption left roughly 300 apps and 900 flows in the default environment, most owned by people who had changed roles. Nobody could answer which apps touched personal data, and every audit turned into a manual inventory exercise.
Architecture#
An environment strategy with personal, team and product tiers; managed environments and DLP policies per tier; solution-based ALM with Azure DevOps pipelines and service-principal deployments; and a Center of Excellence toolkit feeding a Dataverse inventory that is the single source of truth for ownership and data classification.
Solution#
The rollout was staged so nothing broke on a Monday morning. We froze the default environment for new production workloads, gave every existing owner a two-week window and a migration checklist, and archived what nobody claimed.
A one-page "path to production" document (five steps, no exceptions) did more for adoption than the tooling. Makers got a faster route to a real environment than the shadow route they had been using.
Results#
- 300+: Apps inventoried and classified
- 5 steps: Documented path to production
- 4 → 1: Weeks from request to governed environment
Lessons learned#
Governance only sticks when the compliant path is the fastest path. Every control we added had to come with something makers got back.