A CoE that exists on paper is overhead, not governance. A CoE that works is a living practice: visible, responsive, and genuinely useful to the people who interact with it.
What a working CoE actually does
- Maintains the platform: environment management, DLP policy, licence allocation, CoE kit updates
- Enables makers: onboarding, training, templates, office hours, answering questions
- Governs solutions: reviewing high-risk applications, managing compliance, ensuring production standards
- Advocates internally: showcasing what has been built, making the case for continued investment
- Measures and reports: active apps, flows, maker count, adoption trends, platform costs
The maker community
The most underinvested part of most CoE programmes. Build it deliberately: regular meetups, a Teams community channel, a showcase programme, recognition for active contributors.
What to measure monthly
Active makers, apps with users, flows with successful runs, compliance review queue, environment and storage consumption, support requests received and resolved.
The measure of a CoE's success is not the number of governance policies written. It is whether makers feel supported and whether the platform is growing in quality and scale.
A CoE that cannot tell leadership what impact the Power Platform programme has had in the past quarter is not yet a functioning CoE. Start measuring from day one.
