Vodafone employees achieve big productivity gains with Power Platform while maintaining high governance standards

“The app I built in Power Apps isn’t complex, but it definitely solved a complex business problem,” says Darina Nolan, Process Improvement Lead in the Finance Business Unit at Vodafone. The app was used to reduce customer payments managed by her team by 40%. Not bad for someone with no previous development training or experience.  

Darina is just one of many employees leading a wave of innovation at Vodafone using Microsoft Power Platform. Like her colleagues, she stumbled on Power Platform when browsing through the tools available to her through Office 365. She quickly discovered that she had all the tools needed to improve Vodafone’s payment resolution process. 

Previously, these cases were resolved through a mostly manual process using email and spreadsheets. Darina built a solution in which all cases are submitted, tracked, and resolved in Power Apps using a unified SharePoint database. Managers can use the same app to check the status of each case.  

As the business process evolves, Darina updates the app right along with it. “The beauty of Power Platform is that I can quickly adjust the app however the team wants, right when they need the updates,” she says.  

The success of the app caught the attention of another team. Darina was able to repurpose components from her payments app to build a similar solution even faster. This has led to even more requests from other teams—requests that Darina is more than happy to deliver. “I like solving problems with technology. Power Platform has made the favorite part of my job even more enjoyable.”  

Along with citizen developers such as Darina, many of Vodafone’s full-time developers have also been moving to Power Platform. Gergely Bányay, a business process automation specialist at Vodafone, had been doing a lot of his work in PowerShell before his team asked him to try Power Platform. He was pleasantly surprised. “After just a few days of working with the tools, I discovered that I could build the same automations we needed in a lot less time,” he says.   

Aleksandra Czyzewska, Principal Manager Collaboration Architecture & Solutions at Vodafone, sees these same stories playing out across the company. She says, “Power Platform has not only enabled our developers and IT architects to provide better solutions for employees, but it also allows our employees to create their own solutions to improve and automate their daily tasks.” 

Security becomes a top priority  

Employees at Vodafone have been working with Power Platform almost since the platform was launched. It’s not surprising. As a leading telecommunications company, Vodafone fosters a natural drive for innovation.  

As with Darina’s project, citizen developers at Vodafone often start with simple apps and automations such as moving a document through an approval process or automating email alerts in Outlook. “People have discovered that Power Platform can give them a professional edge,” says Lavlesh Ahuja, Product Manager for Power Platform at Vodafone.  

Lavlesh also saw an opportunity to streamline the company’s entire development process. “With Power Platform, we could replace several traditional platforms with a simpler, more consistent development experience that everyone could use,” he says.  

As the number of apps developed on Power Platform grew, the security and privacy teams at Vodafone needed to guarantee the safety of the data flowing to and from these apps.  

Initially, Vodafone was managing a few hundred Power Platform solutions active across the company. Vodafone was eager to support many more. First, however, the company had to ensure a strict governance process was in place. Lavlesh and his team were eager to get to work.  

Improving governance with a Center of Excellence  

To kick off the company’s new Power Platform governance strategy, Lavlesh and his team made use of the Center of Excellence Starter Kit. The kit is a collection of components, tools, and best practices for supporting both adoption and management of the platform. “What I especially liked about the COE Starter Kit is the guidance it gave us for developing processes to understand, govern, and nurture our users,” says Thomas Pape, Application Manager for Vodafone Collaboration Services.  

One of the first tools that the team used in the kit was the pre-built Power BI dashboard that augments telemetry available in the Power Platform admin center. This additional telemetry would prove especially valuable. One of the first things the team noticed was that multiple apps were running premium connectors with a license about to expire.  

Vodafone quickly distributed the licenses needed to keep these apps running. Telemetry also indicated a large number of inactive apps. The team created a policy in Power Platform that automatically scanned for inactive apps and removed them from the system if needed. “By removing inactive and orphaned apps, we were able to get a better picture of real usage and adoption and identify our most successful solutions,” says Alaa Mohyeldin, Operation Support Engineer at Vodafone.  

The team then set up a new environment strategy. (A Power Platform environment is essentially a controlled access container for apps and flows.) All license users at Vodafone have access to the default environment, which is limited to standard Office 365 connectors. A second environment allows for access to premium connectors, plus custom connectors approved by Vodafone. A third environment was set up for users requiring custom connectors not previously approved.  

Employees using the default environment for the first time get an automated welcome email with links to training and governance policies. For access to the other premium environments, employees complete a form describing their app and why a premium or custom connector is needed. This triggers an email to the review team. Once a request is approved, a license is activated for the employee and the original request form is automatically archived for governance. The entire onboarding system was built using Power Apps and Power Automate.  

The security and operations teams were immediately impressed with the new governance structure. “Shortly after deploying our CoE, it was confirmed that there was zero open risk related to our Power Platform infrastructure,” says Lavlesh.  

This was exactly the kind of endorsement they wanted. Vodafone now had both the Power Platform tools—and the governance processes—to fully support low-code development across the company and take the benefits of Power Platform even further.  

Shortly after Vodafone deployed its Power Platform CoE, the company began promoting the platform at company-wide wide events. At the same time, the Power Platform team ramped up user training. The company also set up a dedicated community inside Vodafone’s social networking platform.  

Enthusiasm and expertise inside the community runs high. Employees are eager to share their new solutions; and are just as willing to help others within the community. As Lavlesh says, “A few years ago, we would have to handle all the technical questions raised within our community. Now, citizen developers jump in right away with answers.”   

From document management to resource planning  

With a strong Center of Excellence in place, it wasn’t long before Power Platform solutions were being used to update business processes across the company.  

Vodafone’s testing team built a solution that improved its entire project pipeline. The team had originally looked at off-the-shelf project management applications to help manage incoming project requests, but the available options lacked a resource management component needed to match projects with engineers’ availability. (Not an easy task with more than 400 engineers on the team.)  

The team used Power Platform to streamline both demand and resource management. Requests for test services are submitted through a form built using Microsoft Forms. Data from the Resource Management app is used to check for the right skill availability for the planned project duration. Project data is combined and routed using Power Automate and stored in a SharePoint repository. Demand forecasting, utilization, and analysis is done in Power BI. There are also applications for capturing customer feedback and managing technical training for the team.  

“With our Power Platform solution, we have improved the processing of test requests by 70%,” says SatParkash Maurya, Quality Engineering Manager in Vodafone’s Test Operations division. “This has enabled us to manage 60% more requests a month. 

Similar solutions have started popping up in other divisions—with equally impressive results. James White, a Customer Solution Architect, used Power Platform for his Solution Design Digital Squad, which creates custom solutions for enterprise customers in the Vodafone’s UK region. The solutions are described in design documents, which require detailed peer review before sending to customers. But tracking down a colleague with the time and specific technical experience for a review was challenging and not all documents made it through the process.  

The Peer Review solution that White built in Power Apps solved the problem. The app consolidates and displays all papers ready for review and lists the specific skills required to review a specific document—along with the availability of engineers with those skills. Once a paper is assigned and an engineer accepts an assignment, workloads are adjusted on a dashboard.  

Unleashing the full potential of Power Platform

While the majority of Power Apps solutions have been created using standard tools available to all employees in the default environment, more and more employees are seeing the potential for more advanced applications.  

Take, for example, the resource management solution that James developed. To manage a growing team of more than 100 engineers, he’s planning a move from SharePoint to Dataverse to provide even better scale and more responsive analysis.

Lavlesh and his Power Platform team are eager to see these ideas come to life. As he says, “Based on the productivity gains we’ve already made using basic Power Platform tools, it’s exciting to think what we can accomplish using Dataverse and other advanced features.” For Vodafone, it seems that even bigger productivity gains are just around the corner.  

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