If you're responsible for Power Platform in your organisation, you're probably familiar with this situation. The platform is active - there are apps, flows, maybe even some agents - but nobody has a clear picture of where you are, where you should be heading, or who owns the decisions to get there. The conversations that need to happen between IT, governance, and business leadership simply aren't happening.
That's not a technology problem. It's a structure problem. And it's solvable.
A governance audit - a quick technical snapshot of how the tenant is configured - is a good starting point. But sometimes what you actually need is bigger than a settings review. You need a direction. A full roadmap. A Power Platform strategy that dovetails into your existing policies, existing governance groups, and existing ways of working - not a standalone document that sits in a SharePoint folder and gets forgotten.
This article walks you through how to run that process yourself, from preparation through to a finished roadmap.
The short version: A maturity assessment is four structured conversations - not four months of consulting. You use Microsoft's adoption maturity model as the framework, your own people as the experts, and the transcript from each session as the raw material for every deliverable that follows. The whole point is to create the conversations that aren't happening on their own.
The framework: Microsoft's adoption maturity model
Microsoft publishes an adoption maturity model that defines nine dimensions of Power Platform capability. Each dimension has five levels - from 100 (Initial) through to 500 (Efficient). It's a useful framework because it's well-maintained, it covers both technical and organisational concerns, and it gives you a common language for talking about where you are and where you want to be.
The nine dimensions are:
Strategy & vision
Is Power Platform part of your digital strategy, or just something IT inherited?
Business value
Can you measure the impact of what's been built? Do you have KPIs?
Security
Data policies, tenant isolation, sharing limits, compliance posture.
Governance
Environment strategy, monitoring, request management, hygiene.
Support
Who supports the apps in production? Is there ALM? Risk profiles?
Community
Maker onboarding, champions, training, hackathons, career paths.
Responsible AI
AI governance policies, risk frameworks, training, data management.
Automation
How automated are your admin, ALM, and governance processes?
Fusion teams
Are citizen developers and pro devs working together, or apart?
You don't need to be at level 500 across every dimension. Most organisations don't, and most shouldn't aim for it. The value of the model is in surfacing the gaps between where you are now and where you need to be for what you're trying to do. A firm that wants to deploy agents across the business has different maturity requirements than one that just needs to govern a handful of departmental apps.
The process: four sessions and a prep call
The entire assessment runs across four sessions plus a preparation call. Each session builds on the last. The total elapsed time is typically two to three weeks - enough time to do the analysis between sessions, but not so much that momentum dies.
Preparation: governance audit
Gather your admin team - the people with access to the Power Platform admin centre - for a one-to-two-hour working session. Open the admin centre on a shared screen and walk through the tenant together. This isn't an assessment; it's data collection.
- Environment setup - how many, what types, who owns them
- Key settings - DLP policies, sharing limits, tenant isolation
- Current licensing - what's provisioned, what's consumed
- Quick inventory - what's been built, what's active, what's orphaned
- History to date - how did Power Platform arrive in your organisation? Who championed it? What went well, what didn't?
The goal is an admin snapshot that informs the conversations to come. Move fast - it's just about getting the facts on the table.
Session 1: initial discovery
Bring together your IT team, your Power Platform admins, and anyone who's been involved in low-code or automation work. No slides, no frameworks yet - just an open conversation. The focus is entirely on the present: what's happening with Power Platform today, how people feel about it, and what's not working.
- What are the current issues, hopes, and ambitions for Power Platform and low-code?
- What's been built? What's working? What's causing pain?
- What other systems are in play for low-code or agent-based automation - not just Microsoft?
- What processes exist to support Power Platform today - policies for AI use, ideas capture, innovation processes, governance forums?
- Who owns decisions? Is there a steering group, a working group, a named product owner?
Record this session. The transcript becomes the foundation for everything that follows.
Session 2: maturity model walkthrough
This is the structured assessment. Walk through each of the nine dimensions with the same group, describe what each level looks like, and discuss where your organisation sits today.
- For each dimension, describe levels 100 through 500 using Microsoft's definitions - share the documentation on screen so everyone can see what "good" looks like
- Draft an initial assessment based on what you learned in the governance audit and Session 1, and present it for discussion
- Calibrate together - the room will often adjust the initial scoring up or down once people start talking
- For each dimension, ask: where do we want to be in 12 months? What would "good" look like for us?
The output is two scores per dimension: current state and target state. This is the raw data for the gap analysis.
Session 3: gap playback
Between Sessions 2 and 3, review the transcript and build a visual summary of the gaps. A radar chart is the most effective format - it shows all nine dimensions at once, with the current state and target state overlaid so the gaps are immediately obvious. Bring this back to the group - ideally with leadership in the room for this one.
The chart makes the conversation concrete. Instead of abstract discussions about "where we need to improve," you're pointing at specific gaps and asking: is this one worth closing? What would it take? Who owns it?
From the gap analysis, define a to-do list. Go through each gap and agree what's in scope, what's out, and what the priority order is. Some gaps will be urgent (security posture, for example). Others might be aspirational and can wait. The discipline is in being explicit about what you're choosing not to do, and why.
Session 4: the roadmap
With the prioritised to-do list from Session 3, build the roadmap. This is where the work gets practical.
- Some items will sit with existing teams or working groups - brief them on what needs to happen and why, so it's clear and actionable
- Some items will need new governance structures - an AI council, a Power Platform working group, a named product owner
- Some items might need external help - a partner for environment hardening, training, or specialist technical work you don't have capacity for
- Sequence matters: governance foundations first, then platform configuration, then enablement and community
The roadmap should dovetail into your organisation's existing governance groups and policies. Power Platform doesn't exist in isolation - it needs to connect with your M365 governance, your data governance, your security posture, your change management. A roadmap that ignores these connections is a roadmap that will stall.
Why conversations matter more than documents
The deliverables from this process - the radar chart, the gap analysis, the roadmap - are useful. But they're not the point. The point is the conversations that produce them.
In most organisations, the people who understand the platform's technical state (IT admins), the people who understand what the business needs (department heads, process owners), and the people who can authorise investment (leadership) are not in the same room often enough. The maturity assessment creates a structured reason for those conversations to happen, with a framework that keeps them productive and a visible output that holds everyone accountable.
If you've ever been in an organisation where everyone agrees "we should do something about Power Platform governance" but nothing actually changes - this is the process that breaks the deadlock.
Making execution easier with AI
Every session in this process produces a transcript. That transcript is the raw material for everything that follows - and with the right tools, you can turn it around remarkably fast.
Use AI to accelerate the output, not replace the conversation. Record every session with Microsoft Teams transcription. Then feed the transcript into Copilot Cowork or a similar tool to draft the gap analysis, build the radar chart, prepare the roadmap presentation, and write the decision papers you'll need for leadership sign-off. What used to take days of preparation between sessions can be done in hours.
The pattern is simple: have a great conversation, capture the transcript, use AI to draft the deliverable, then review and refine with your own judgement. The AI handles the synthesis and formatting. You bring the context, the relationships, and the knowledge of what will actually land with your leadership team.
This matters because the biggest cost of a maturity assessment isn't the sessions themselves - it's the time between sessions. If it takes two weeks to analyse a transcript and prepare the next deck, you lose momentum and people disengage. If you can turn it around in a day or two, the energy stays high and the whole process compresses from months to weeks.
What you'll need
Four things: someone with Power Platform admin access for the governance audit, the right people in the room for each session (your admin and IT team for Sessions 1 and 2, leadership for Sessions 3 and 4), a copy of Microsoft's maturity model documentation, and a way to record and transcribe each conversation.
If you bring in a partner to help facilitate, make sure they're running conversations - not running a checklist. The value is in the dialogue, not the audit.
Need help getting started? If you'd like an experienced facilitator or want to compare notes on what other organisations have done, we're happy to talk.
Framework based on Microsoft's Power Platform adoption maturity model. Published May 2026.