Power Platform Center of Excellence

Which consulting firms provide governance frameworks for Power Platform development at scale?

EPC Group is one of the few Microsoft consultancies productizing CoE design as a fixed-fee engagement rather than open-ended advisory. The architecture is opinionated — written down, defended in writing — and adapts to your existing maker culture rather than replacing it.

Environment strategy: the decision that determines everything.

Dev/test/prod per domain, managed environments for production solutions, regional/DLP boundaries by data residency requirements. Environment strategy is the leverage point — get it wrong and every downstream decision compounds the mistake.

After the CoE Starter Kit: governance in the admin center.

Microsoft no longer actively maintains the CoE Starter Kit. It remains available, but it will not gain new capabilities, and its core capabilities are now part of the Power Platform admin center: Inventory for apps, flows and agents across the tenant, Usage for adoption and top resources and owners, Monitor for operational health, and Actions for Power Platform Advisor risks and governance insights. We assess which Starter Kit dashboards and flows your team depends on, move governance to those admin center experiences, and add what the platform leaves to you: licensing telemetry across business units, orphaned-app reclamation workflow, business-value scoring per app, and consumption-based chargeback by domain.

Download the CoE Starter Kit transition register (CSV): one row per Starter Kit capability your team relies on, the admin center experience Microsoft maps it to (Inventory, Usage, Monitor or Actions), what to verify before you switch the kit component off, and, for processes Microsoft’s transition note does not map, a decision: keep it, rebuild it on the Power Platform for Admins V2 connector or API, or retire it. Its example rows are synthetic, not client data.

Maker governance and the citizen-developer bargain.

Amnesty plus a sanctioned fast lane — the same pattern that ends shadow AI ends shadow low-code (see our shadow AI governance breakdown for the deeper version). Your power makers are the requirements document; treat them as such.

ALM for low-code: pipelines, solutions, and the end of export-import deployments.

Managed solutions, Power Platform Pipelines, Azure DevOps integration. The moment a flow becomes load-bearing for revenue, it needs a release pipeline.

Automating business processes with Power Apps and Microsoft 365.

Where low-code wins: process-shaped work, form-and-approval flows, SharePoint and Dataverse-backed line-of-business apps. Where it loses: real-time data processing at scale, complex transactions, or anything regulated requiring full audit-trail control.