Power Platform Governance & Operations

Start with CoE Starter Kit. It gives you flow inventory, app inventory, maker analytics, and admin alerts in one weekend of deployment work versus six months of custom build. Most organizations need to extend CoE rather than replace it: add custom inventory queries, alerting wired to ITSM, and per-environment reporting. The kit is the floor, not the ceiling.

Three environments per business unit minimum: developer (per-maker isolated), test (shared, pipeline target), production (managed, restricted). Default Environment is for personal/shadow use only. Solution-aware everything in dev/test/prod. Power Platform Pipelines or Azure DevOps for promotion. Avoid the anti-pattern of "all makers in Default Environment", which creates an ungovernable mess that costs more to clean up than it saved on day one.

Solutions, always, in production. Loose flows cannot move between environments cleanly, cannot be source-controlled, and cannot be promoted via pipelines. The only acceptable use of loose flows is one-off personal automation in the maker's personal environment. Anything that touches production data or business-critical workflows must live in a solution.

Export the solution as unmanaged, unpack it with Solution Packager (`pac solution unpack`), commit the unpacked artifacts to git. Each flow becomes a JSON file. Repack on import. Power Platform CLI plus a small bash wrapper handles the round-trip. The mistake teams make is committing the .zip directly: it is opaque to git diff and merges destructively.