US Healthcare System: What happens when Microsoft Power Platform grows faster than governance

Microsoft Power Platform had become the go-to tool for getting things done. Teams across the organization had embraced it, building flows and apps to solve real problems without waiting for IT. That kind of energy is exactly what citizen development is supposed to unlock.

The challenge is that ungoverned growth has a compounding quality. By the time TQA was engaged, hundreds of solutions had accumulated across the tenant with no shared framework for how they were built, owned, or maintained. Nobody had a complete picture of what was running, who owned it, or what would happen if something broke.

The Default environment alone held hundreds of Power Automate flows, Canvas apps, Copilot agents, and solutions — a sprawl that had built up organically over time, with no lifecycle controls and limited visibility.

Governance infrastructure existed in theory. The organization had invested in Microsoft’s CoE Starter Kit and deployed it across the tenant. But it had never been fully configured, and the monitoring features had never been activated. The gap between having the tools and actually using them is one of the most common — and most consequential — patterns TQA sees in enterprise Power Platform environments.

TQA structured the engagement to address risk first, then build the technical infrastructure to sustain governance long-term, then invest in the people and culture layer that determines whether any of it actually sticks.

The governance framework covered environment tiering, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies calibrated by risk profile, an end-to-end Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) pipeline from development through testing to production, and a security model aligned to the organization’s regulatory requirements. Every recommendation was designed to be proportionate, practical, and maintainable by the internal team.

The enablement layer was built on the same principle. A complete training curriculum was developed from scratch — fourteen self-paced modules covering the full maker and administrator lifecycle — alongside a champions program and community infrastructure designed to sustain adoption without ongoing external support.

Every deliverable was built as an internal asset. The goal was an organization that could govern, train, and scale its Power Platform program on its own terms.

The training strategy was also scoped around a real constraint: no near-term plan for premium Power Platform licenses. Rather than build a curriculum around capabilities the team could not yet access, TQA designed it for the standard-connector ecosystem available from day one — building adoption momentum on what was immediately usable.