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Recommendations for fostering fusion team culture

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Applies to this Power Platform Well-Architected Operational Excellence checklist recommendation:

OE:01 Determine workload team members' specializations, and integrate them into a robust set of practices to design, develop, deploy, and operate your workload to specification. Team members must have clarity in decision making and responsibilities, value continuous improvement and optimization, and adopt a blameless culture that incorporates continuous learning.

Fusion development teams are distributed and multidisciplinary digital business teams that blend technology and other types of domain expertise. Fusion development allows your organization to build better solutions faster by bringing together professional developers with citizen, or low-code, developers.

This guide describes the recommendations for implementing fusion development principles and practices in your workload. Fostering fusion development culture can help build a foundation of shared ownership, mutual respect, and appreciation of high-quality work in your workload team. Fusion development culture provides a template for high-performing teams to thrive in the system that they're in.

Key design strategies

A workload that operates according to the Power Platform Well-Architected recommended practices starts with the adoption of the fusion development culture of cohesiveness, responsibility, continuous learning, and improvement. Team members bring their own expertise and might focus on specific areas of workload operation. However, your team as a whole should be able to independently manage day-to-day, as-needed, and emergency tasks, with support from outside teams when necessary. Your team must work within the overall organizational requirements and collaborate with other teams by using a mindset that values shared knowledge.

The following recommendations can help you adopt and implement fusion development practices in your team.

Foster mutual respect

A team's success is built on mutual respect and trust. A code of ethics that values individual expertise and recognizes it as a core tenet of the team culture can help foster a safe and inclusive environment. Individuals should feel they can share their honest opinions about workload operations and be treated respectfully.

Mutual respect fosters a blameless culture. When issues arise, the workload team should take collaborative ownership and work together to find ways to improve, and avoid assigning blame and risking the team's cohesiveness.

Leadership buy-in and executive sponsorship empowers the Power Platform adoption journey. Leadership support is critical to ensuring that the workload team has the necessary resources, guidance, and encouragement to deepen their knowledge of Power Platform. Executive sponsors can help communicate the vision and benefits of Power Platform to the rest of the organization, as well as advocate for the workload team's needs and achievements.

Team roles and responsibilities

Recognize that teams take ownership and responsibility for the workload when they value their work. The workload team is responsible for the end-to-end operation of its workload. While certain aspects of the workload operation might require outside services, your team should collaborate with other teams to ensure that all functions are successfully completed. Regardless of how involved they are in supporting services, team members must consider every function that supports the workload as their responsibility. This mindset helps reinforce a common sense of ownership.

Clearly define team roles and decision-making responsibilities. Team decision making should be as democratic as possible, but structured so that decisions are made efficiently. When there are differing opinions about a situation, someone must be responsible for making the final decision based on the evidence presented. Team decisions can affect the entire workload, so it's important that individuals feel heard and valued throughout the decision-making process even if they don't agree with the final decision.

Continuous learning and improvement

Use enablement teams to the workload teams' advantage. Some organizations have a Center of Excellence or Center of Enablement team that provides standards and guidance to ensure consistency in design and process. Empower your workload team to work collaboratively with this team to improve processes and share knowledge. Support a mindset of continuous learning and improvement in your team through open communication. Learn more in Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit.

Learn from each other to develop a cross-functional team. Establish a team structure in which everyone is a specialist in their function and a generalist in all other functions so that team members can support each other when needed. Cross-functionality helps team members develop appreciation for each other's expertise and can help them understand the complexity of the entire workload.

Encourage upskilling. A team member might start out as a low-code or business expert but become more interested in code-first components of the platform. Encourage and allow time for acquiring new knowledge and expertise, which improves employee engagement and facilitates career journeys.

Invest in your professional development by staying up to date with the latest Power Platform features and capabilities. Microsoft Learn for Power Platform offers certifications and learning paths to help you master the skills and concepts of low-code app development, data analysis, automation, and AI. Deepening your knowledge increases your confidence and credibility in designing, building, and managing Power Platform solutions, and also validates your expertise and demonstrates value to your organization. Join the Power Platform Community to gain access to events, webinars, forums, communities, and networking opportunities with other professionals.

Commitment to optimization

Understand business, regulatory, and other requirements and integrate them into your practices. Workload teams don't operate in a vacuum. Your team is subject to requirements enforced by the business, industry, and geographic regions you operate in. Ensure that your workload team members understand the requirements that they must follow and the consequences of a failure to meet those requirements.

Proactively adapt your practices to ensure that you're compliant with requirements. Your organization might impose some degree of governance over your workload. Use the requirements your business standardizes as guardrails to ensure that you're operating appropriately.

Regularly review your standard operating procedures with the team to foster discussions about areas of improvement. Avoid complacency and encourage innovative thinking by fostering a philosophy that all standard operating procedures should be continuously reviewed and improved throughout the workload life cycle. Team members should feel empowered to offer opinions on improvements at any time. However, ensure that you dedicate time to review procedures together so that everyone has space to think about areas for improvement and conduct focused discussions about their ideas.

Embrace safe experimentation. Give team members access to sandbox environments and ensure that time is built into sprints to allow for experimentation.

Stay informed about Power Platform enhancements and incorporate them into your existing resources. Ensure that your workload is always optimized and aligned with the best practices and standards of the platform. Use the platform's innovation and potential to deliver more value and better experiences to your business and customers. Experiment with the new features and capabilities in your sandbox or development environments before applying them to your production resources. Test and validate the functionality and performance of the enhancements and ensure that they're compatible with your existing configurations and customizations. Incorporate the enhancements into your resources where it makes sense and where they can add value to your workload. Document the changes and communicate them to your stakeholders and users. Monitor the effect and outcomes of the enhancements and collect feedback to measure their effectiveness and satisfaction.

Considerations

Strictly defined roles and responsibilities could result in a level of discomfort for some team members when they're performing functions outside their responsibility. Conduct open and honest discussions with the team about team structure, and be open to making adjustments when needed.

Power Platform facilitation

The generative AI features in Power Apps and Power Automate are transforming how software applications are built. With the power of large language models, Power Platform is advancing to the next step in the evolution of code abstraction: moving from low-code to natural language authoring, and enabling humans and machines to work together to build solutions. With the Copilot feature in Power Apps and Power Automate, you receive in-app guidance through natural language processing to help you build your app or flow. These features can help workload teams with diverse skill sets to develop better apps and streamline their software development processes.

Create or expand your Center of Excellence (CoE) with the Power Platform CoE Starter Kit.

Next steps

Operational Excellence checklist