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Managing Microsoft Power Automate Flows in Enterprises – Seeking Best Practices

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Hi everyone,

I'm looking for best practices for managing Microsoft Power Automate Flows in enterprise environments and would appreciate your experiences and insights. We're using Power Automate extensively in our company, and some questions have come up where we're unsure how best to proceed.

Specifically, I'm interested in the following points:


  • Loss of Flows due to Departing Employees: How do you ensure that flows are not lost when an employee who created the flow leaves the company? Are there mechanisms for automatic transfer or notification?

  • Enforcing Co-Owners: Is there a way to automatically or by policy enforce a co-owner for each flow to prevent outages? Are there perhaps even automations for this?

  • Flow Environments: How are your Power Automate environments structured? Do you use separate environments for different departments or projects? How do you handle permissions and access?

  • Critical Flows: What happens when a flow created by an individual user becomes a business-critical process over time? Is there a process for "taking over" and officially maintaining such flows? How is responsibility and documentation ensured?

  • Documentation and Version Control: How do you document your flows? Do you use external tools or the integrated functions? Is there any kind of version control to track changes?

  • Governance: What policies and governance processes have you implemented for the creation and operation of Power Automate Flows?


  •  

I'm very curious about your answers and experiences. Perhaps we can collectively compile a collection of best practices that helps everyone.

Thank you in advance!

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  • Verified answer
    David_MA Profile Picture
    David_MA 8,884 on at
    Managing Microsoft Power Automate Flows in Enterprises – Seeking Best Practices
    When answering, I am coming from the perspective of business-critical flows developed and maintained by IT. We have "citizen developers" and when they accept the terms of use, they understand that flows they develop are for personal productivity or small groups and not for business critical processes. When the person leaves, they need to reassign ownership to someone else before they leave. Otherwise, no support.
     
    • Loss of Flows due to Departing Employees: How do you ensure that flows are not lost when an employee who created the flow leaves the company? Are there mechanisms for automatic transfer or notification? Each flow developer in IT is assigned a service account. When they leave, it is reassigned to their replacement. The service account has all the necessary licenses, etc. Since the account is not deleted, it does not become a problem. You just need to make sure you have the appropriate security model in place.
    • Enforcing Co-Owners: Is there a way to automatically or by policy enforce a co-owner for each flow to prevent outages? Are there perhaps even automations for this? I don't know of any way. If you follow the above method, it is not needed.
    • Flow Environments: How are your Power Automate environments structured? Do you use separate environments for different departments or projects? How do you handle permissions and access? I work for a global company. We have at least two environments for each IT team in each region: dev and prod. We also have separate environments for citizen development that has premium connectors disabled. Other environments are created as needed. For example, the BI team in IT has their own flow environment separate from the ones I use.
    • Critical Flows: What happens when a flow created by an individual user becomes a business-critical process over time? Is there a process for "taking over" and officially maintaining such flows? How is responsibility and documentation ensured? Our governance dictates that business-critical flows must be created and maintained by IT. We do not waiver from this. If someone develops a flow and it becomes "business critical" they need to submit a request to the automation team and wait for it to go onto our backlog for development. We also have an outside contractor we work with that can develop the flow, which the department will need to pay for out of their budget, and we will import into our environment once it is built. Nobody has wanted to go that route yet :-)
    • Documentation and Version Control: How do you document your flows? Do you use external tools or the integrated functions? Is there any kind of version control to track changes? We generate flow documentation with this: GitHub - modery/PowerDocu: Generate technical documentation from your existing Power Automate Flows and Power Apps canvas apps
    • Governance: What policies and governance processes have you implemented for the creation and operation of Power Automate Flows? I cannot go into more detail than what I have already said on our governance as that is company-confidential information other than to say we have governance policies and processes.

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