Building a Power Apps Center of Excellence with a Nearshore Team

Solzet plugs a senior, Microsoft-certified Power Platform team into your organization on a B2B contract, usually starting within weeks rather than the months an in-house hire takes. We work in your Azure DevOps, GitHub, or Jira, join your standups and sprint reviews, and can work under your brand as a white-label extension of your team. From day one we bring governance, a development framework, and reusable components rather than starting from scratch.

A Power Apps Center of Excellence is the set of governance, standards, reusable components, and support that lets an organization build on the Power Platform safely and at scale. In practice it means a clear Dataverse environment strategy, data loss prevention policies, solution-based application lifecycle management, a library of reusable and PCF components, and enablement for your makers. It turns scattered app building into a managed, repeatable capability.

Contain before you organize. Put data loss prevention policies in place that cover the default environment, restrict external and custom connectors that can move data out of the tenant, close anything shared publicly or with the whole organization, including Power Pages sites with anonymous access to Dataverse, and rotate and move hardcoded credentials into Azure Key Vault. Check what each DLP policy would break before enforcing it. Only then build the structure: a CoE Starter Kit inventory, an environment strategy, an ALM baseline and naming standards, keeping the evidence as each control goes in.

It varies by framework, so agree the list with your auditor early, but the usual set is a dated inventory with owners, the DLP policies in force and the environments they cover, an exceptions register with owners and expiry dates, what was done about publicly shared assets and hardcoded credentials, the environment strategy, pipeline run history showing production changes went through an approved route, the naming standard, a record of a governance review actually run, and a dated plan for the cleanup still to come.

Yes, and it is the part that decides whether the next audit is routine. A nearshore team works the weekly governance queue of environment, connector and exception requests against your written policy, keeps the CoE Starter Kit inventory running, reviews exceptions at expiry, reassigns assets in the leaver process, checks release waves against your policies and pipelines, and refreshes the evidence pack on a schedule. Your named owner keeps the business decisions; the team does the operating work, in your tenant through accounts you control.

Yes, when the team is genuinely senior. Solzet delivers from Yerevan, Armenia, and every engagement is staffed with Microsoft-certified engineers holding credentials such as PL-200, PL-400, and PL-600. You avoid the recruiting lead time, the salary base, and the ramp-up of building in-house, while getting people who have set up governance and frameworks before.

A Center of Excellence is meant to build durable in-house capability, so knowledge transfer is part of the engagement, not an afterthought. We pair with your makers, document the standards and components, run enablement sessions, and hand over source code and managed solutions. Many clients then keep us on a smaller managed-support basis for the harder work while their own team handles day-to-day changes.

Solzet is headquartered in Yerevan in the GMT+4 time zone. That gives roughly 4 to 6 hours of daily overlap with Western European business hours and 6 to 8 hours with the UK and Ireland, which is enough for daily standups, sprint reviews, and stakeholder workshops over Teams or Zoom. For businesses in the Caucasus the hours are the same or adjacent, with on-site meetings possible.

Every engagement runs on a B2B contract with a mutual NDA and a GDPR-compliant data processing agreement. IP created during the work belongs to your organization or your end client as defined in the statement of work, and you receive the source code, managed solutions, and documentation. For white-label work our consultants operate under your brand and do not list your end clients on their public profiles.

Structure the engagement around transfer from day one rather than a handover document at the end. Pair your people with the consultants on real delivery, name one internal owner with protected time, give the team an ALM pipeline they run themselves, and agree in writing what they own and what escalates. Then taper the consultants out in stages, moving on only when a checkpoint shows the internal team can do that stage alone.

A trained administrator can own forms, views, dashboards, business rules, business process flows, simple cloud flows, adding columns, user and team membership and running an existing deployment pipeline. Plugins, custom APIs, PCF controls, client-side JavaScript, integrations with other systems, security model redesign and changes to the pipeline itself need a developer. Writing that split down is what keeps an admin from attempting work that should escalate.

By checkpoints your team passes, not by hours of training delivered. Your owner should explain the data and security model without notes, take a change from backlog to production through the pipeline with review only, and then ship a full release cycle, including a rollback or hotfix, with no consultant hands on the keyboard. If escalations after that are still basic questions, the transfer is not finished.

A minimum viable set, short enough that people remember it: a solution and environment strategy, naming and layering rules under one publisher prefix, a shared component library and a shared custom connector library, source control with one pipeline everyone uses, review expectations for Power Fx and for plugins, and an environment variable convention so nothing environment specific is hard-coded. Anything beyond that can be added once these are followed. A long standards document that nobody reads is worse than eight rules the pipeline enforces.

Make reuse easier than copying. Put the shared canvas components, PCF controls and custom connectors in their own versioned solution with a named owner, show them in use in a flagship app built to the standard, and add a review question to the pull request template asking whether a shared component already covers the need. Pair with each team on their next build so they use the library once with help. Where teams have already built duplicate apps, consolidating them is a separate piece of work.

Because the prefix is baked into the schema name of every table and column a team creates and cannot be changed later. Three teams with three prefixes produce a data model where related tables look unrelated, shared components are awkward to reuse, and consolidation later means rebuilding columns and migrating data. One organization publisher, agreed before the second team starts, avoids that entirely.

Rarely. A course explains the standard once, and the first deadline afterwards is where shortcuts come back. What works with stretched teams is a flagship app built to the standard as a working reference, paired build sessions on the real backlog of each team, checks built into the pipeline and pull request template, and a short mentoring engagement with review and a regular question clinic that ends when teams review each other against the standard without outside help.