We’ve put together a simple solution (Power Platform Administration Planning) that is designed to help you better:

• Plan your team structure
• Review where you spend time and look for automation or innovation opportunities

The solution is built on Microsoft Dataverse and is a new stand-alone component in the CoE Starter Kit. Admin tasks are defined in a model-driven app and insights are provided in a Power BI dashboard.

You can start either by adding your own tasks or by importing a set of example tasks from an Excel spreadsheet, populated with some of the most common administration tasks covering:

• AI Builder
• Environments and connectors
• Power Apps
• Power Automate
• Power Pages
• Power Virtual Agents

You’ll need to review the tasks and populate task metadata to get the best out of the Power BI dashboard.

Plan your team structure

If you’re getting started, you might find importing the sample tasks spreadsheet a great starting point for inspiration. Where possible, we added in the most common administrative tasks that administrators perform and supplied links to supporting/ instructional documentation.

Task metadata is used by the dashboard to provide useful information about your team structure and the level of expertise required to complete your administrative work.

Review where you spend time

You may already be administrating the platform and looking for ways to increase your maturity, looking for automation or innovation opportunities.

When you add your own estimation of which tasks you need, how much time you’ll spend doing them, and who will do them, the dashboard will indicate if the size of your team is sufficient, roles and experience levels and an estimate of how much time to expect to spend administering the platform. After your team has been doing the work for a while, you can update with the exact data.

Admin tasks in the model driven app

Tasks can be imported from the sample spreadsheet or manually created.

Tasks have the following schema:

Power BI dashboard

The structure of the dashboard is designed to help you focus on what you do, how reactive your team is, and the impact that automation and outsourcing (if your organization does) has on your overall efficiency.

Team, outsourcing and automation

Team, outsourcing and automation aggregates administrative task data, indicating:

Team workload – enter the number of staff in your team. Based on aggregated effort, the required hours (per team member) to complete the tasks are estimated.

Outsourcing – what, if any, impact outsourcing is having on your workload. How many resources, and what level of expertise is required.

Automation – This section provides insights into how much time you’re saving by automating tasks and the expertise that would be required.

Task breakdown – proactive & reactive balance

Task breakdown – proactive & reactive balance helps focus on the balance between tasks that are ad-hoc, or reactive. By displaying the percentage of tasks that have been categorised as ad-hoc, and providing a filtered list, it encourages you to look for automation, outsourcing or innovation opportunities.

Team breakdown – experience & personas

Task breakdown – experience & personas aggregates the duration for all tasks by frequency and provides insight on:

Experience levels required – illustrates the experience required across all tasks. This can be useful in estimating training requirements for your existing team

Insight for each ‘core admin persona’ & ‘peripheral persona’ – is useful to understand how many of your tasks rely on additional teams to complete. For example: creating an environment may also require Azure AD Security groups to be created for managing access.

Task overview: experience, persona & categorization

Administrative tasks are categorized, which is useful in understanding where your team spends the most time. Tasks have two categories to provide deeper insight. For example: selecting ‘Reporting’ will not only filter the list of administrative tasks to display tasks categorized with reporting, it will also display tasks by their secondary category. Especially useful to understand what type of reporting your team is focusing on, and how much time they are spending completing this.

Where you can get it

Microsoft Power Platform Administration Planning is a standalone module in the CoE (Center of Excellence) Starter kit, which means it’s open sourced and available for download from the same GitHub repository as the toolkit is. Setup guidance and further information is available.

Watch the Power CAT Live! video where we go into more detail about this solution:

The post Power Platform Administration Planning appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In August 2018, we announced new Power Platform admin and maker connectors for PowerApps and Flow.  These connectors provide access to the resources in the admin or maker scope.

This allows you to more easily gain both insight, and control over your Power Platform estate. Using these connectors makes it possible to build a solution that matches your exact enterprise governance, administration and maintenance requirements.

Recently, I built a PowerApp using these connectors that demonstrates how to manage environments, apps and app compliance. The aim of this app is to address a few common requirements that I ran into whilst working with various customers:

1. (Governance) Easily identify apps where the app maker has not digitally signed a company PowerApps policy, and to be able to send a reminder to the app maker & their line manager.
2. (Maintenance) Easily identify apps that have not been published within the past 60 days.
3. (Administration) Identify apps by form factor.

The App

Lets take a look at the administrator app.

The screenshot above shows the app landing page. The pane on the left had side lists the environments in my tenant. When I click/ select an environment the page updates by returning a list of all apps within the environment and some basic information about the environment itself.

App details & administrative features

Each app in the environment is represented by an app tile.  The tile contains information about the app, such as the title, app maker, governance compliance and form factor.  Clicking on an app tile updates the user interface to provide more detailed information about the app:

The screenshot above shows the app details.  There is detailed information about the app and an area for administrative features (lower right). Each administrative feature or policy compliance has an indicator, quickly drawing your attention to any actions for this app.  The screenshot shows a red indicator showing that the app was last published 72 days ago.  This has been flagged as outside the enterprise policy, hence is highlighted with a red icon.

Next to each administrative feature is an action, in the example we can resolve the publishing issue by clicking the ‘Publish App’ button.  This will re-publish the app.

Governance policy signing

The app indicates if the app author has agreed to a governance and usage policy. How does this work?

To achieve this, I utilized a number of O365 applications:

• SharePoint Site Collection
• Microsoft Forms
• Microsoft Flow

In my tenant I have a site collection for governance and usage of PowerApps.  The policy page (screenshots below) is a modern page containing the policy text (dummy text in my example) and a Microsoft Forms web part.

Top of page:

Bottom of page:

When a PowerApps app maker reads the policy, they select ‘I agree’ in the Microsoft Forms web part.  Upon clicking ‘Submit’ a Microsoft Flow is triggered.  The flow takes the output of the form submission and creates a SharePoint list item in a custom list containing the Email address of the user whom submitted the form:

Back in the app…

For each app, we have an indicator that shows if the app maker has agreed to the PowerApps governance and usage policy.  To achieve this functionality, I used the SharePoint connector to connect to the governance list containing list items for each app maker that agreed to the policy.  In the UI, we have a shape (circle) that is used as an indicator.  The Fill property of this shape takes the app maker Email address and compares it against the SharePoint list.  If the app finds a match, the fill is green (indicating the app maker agreed to the policy). If there is no match, then the fill is set to red:

More functionality and a mobile version of this app will be coming in the future.  If you are interested, a video demonstration is available on YouTube

https://youtu.be/aSNOPhzRcU4

Thank you for reading.
Steve

stjeffer-[MSFT]

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