As we complete another milestone today, it is time to reflect on our achievements at WPP when it comes to the usage of Power Platform in our organisation.
Towards the end of 2021, we started on the endeavour to create a central team to manage and support the Power Platform at WPP (including A LOT of operating companies) and empower our 109,000 employees worldwide to leverage the platform and create valuable solutions. We have achieved a range of things since then, each of which I could talk about for hours easily.
Multi-tenant scope
Our scope is all employees in 10 different tenants. Managing a single tenant is already a good amount of work, 10 tenants provides you with additional challenges (standardisation; centralised reporting; automation wherever possible; ….). To gain valuable insights as well as to support us during our governance & management processes, we deployed Microsoft’s Power Platform CoE Starter Kit to the tenants. Not an easy thing, considering that tenants may also differ slightly (stakeholders, processes, configurations, ….) And today, we also complete the upgrade of the starter kit from the October 2021 release (which we had used) to the February 2023 release ?
Data-Loss Prevention Policies
As part of our governance efforts, we also wanted to deploy a standardised Data Loss Prevention Policy across tenants and create “custom policies” as required for individual requirements. Defining the policy involved not just creating it and applying it to all environments, but a lot of planning, preparation, and testing. How do we ensure that existing apps & Flows don’t get impacted by our new DLP policy? How can we identify impacted Flows? How can we easily create a new policy based on a template with the least amount of effort? All of this was thoroughly considered, and we have a relatively good process in place to manage policies now.
Central Power Platform Community
Empowering our employees is naturally one of the key endeavours. This requires a solid adoption strategy, which for us included a centralised community for all Citizen Developers across the company, regardless of which operating company they work for and which tenant they are located in. Purpose of the community is of course to encourage a knowledge and experience exchange, and to allow people to find support easily when they need it. Technically, that was an interesting challenge. In the end, we leveraged Microsoft Teams and Shared Channels, with a dedicated Team in each tenant, and the Shared Channels attached to them. An employee in Ogilvy (e.g.) now sees the exact same channels as someone from GroupM, even though they are in separate tenants! And new Citizen Developers get added automatically to our community after they created their first App/Flow/Bot.
Reporting
The last item on today’s list is reporting. The COE Starter Kit comes with a very good dashboard to get started with. But…we have 10 tenants, so 10 dashboards? While we do use the individual dashboards as well, we also created an additional dashboard that aggregates the data from the 10 tenants into a single dataset, allowing us to see clearer how the Power Platform is doing overall within the company.
The Core Team
There were a lot of people involved in our activities, but our core team definitely requires a special mention:
Kay Bains who was one of the first members of the team and was a valuable cornerstone in our initial discovery and planning phases, and helped to “share the load” with me during our further rollout. Sadly for us she moved on to another company, but her contributions at WPP are still visible.
Shahida Sharif who managed our Power Platform programme for the past 18+ months and ensured that we remain on track, reminded us regularly to stay focused
Isabelle Anderson who joined our activities in the middle of 2022 and took care of our communications, adoption, and change strategy and activities.
Our Power Platform SMEs Sagar PilliYashwanth M Swagat Sahu Vinoth Kumar K who helped to lay the technical foundations, worked hard to ensure that our COE rollout was successful, and supported our colleagues with their development efforts and thus helped to create a range of solutions.
And of course myself – I gained a lot of additional knowledge in the last year, this has been a very exciting and rewarding year for me with a complete focus on the Power Platform.
This is of course not the end. We are continuing with a range of other activities such as holding more Citizen Developer focused adoption and training events, refining our processes, updating our dashboards, working on providing better internal services, ….