It’s time for a shared, community commitment to Best Practices adopting and developing Power Platform

We’ve had about a year now to chew on Power Platform in what I’ll call its mature form. That is to say, though the components that make up the platform — PowerApps, Power BI, Flow, Common Data Service (CDS), and certainly Dynamics — have been around for some time longer, the notion of those components being united as part of a coherent platform is something that the community of practitioners, customers, and partners really started to get turned on to in the summer of 2018 (around-ish the time Microsoft introduced the “Power Platform” branding).

Then, just this month, Power Platform had a bit of coming-out party at Microsoft Inspire. More than one Azure guru has recently told me something along the lines of “Oh, I get it now”. My colleague said something to the effect, “The last several Inspires have been Azure Azure Azure. This week has been all Power Platform all the time”.

Now that we have what I will call a mature and evolving platform, it’s time that the community around that platform get serious about meaningful best practices.

We owe it to our customers, our employers, and one another to adhere to a shared commitment to excellence and a body of best practices that back up the way we adopt the platform and develop solutions there. Those of us working on the Power Platform Adoption Framework have sought to advance best practices for adopting the platform at scale, and happily there is great momentum advancing best practices around other facets of the technology as well.

When we think about Best Practices, I think it’s useful to keep some guiding principles in mind. In other words, the best practices we create and adopt together should serve one or more of the following goals:

1. Adopt and use Power Platform as a true platform, not a one-off app of the moment solution

2. Reduce technical debt in order to smooth the path of continuous enhancement

3. Make it easier for one developer to pick up where the previous developer left off, thus promoting sustainability of what we develop

4. Scale our implementations with sound data architecture, application lifecycle management, and enterprise management

5. Grow the community through sharing, education, and user-focused collaboration

(I’m probably missing some)

Earlier this year I sought input on this topic from the community, received an amazing response, and subsequently turned those contributions into a presentation I’ve been giving around the world: Best Practices for No-Code / Low-Code Development on Power Platform. I’m going to begin aggregating those best practices here as part of an ongoing blog series, and wanted to begin by sharing a recording of this presentation produced at the very excellent 365 Saturday in Kyiv, Ukraine in May of 2019.

As always, I hope you’ll share your best practices with me and with the community so that we can continue to evolve and improve these together. Thanks for joining us!