A shortlist in 72 hours, contributing inside two weeks, and a 30-day guarantee if the fit is wrong.
72-hour shortlist · 30-day replacement guarantee · Month-to-month
Power Platform does what it promises. Somebody in operations who understands the process builds an app in a fortnight that would have taken a development team a quarter. That is a genuine win and it is why adoption spreads so quickly.
The problem arrives eighteen months later. There are now a hundred and forty apps and flows. Most sit in the default environment, where everyone in the tenant has access and nothing was ever governed. A dozen are business-critical. Several are owned by people who have left the company, and their flows run on connections tied to accounts that no longer exist — so they stop, silently, and somebody notices when a report does not arrive.
Nobody made a bad decision. The platform made building easy and made governing optional, and optional governance is the thing that does not happen while everything is working.
So the hire you need is usually not somebody who can build faster. It is somebody who can bring structure to what already exists without stopping the thing that made it valuable.
The build is rarely the hard part here. What follows it is.
Whether they know which queries delegate to the data source and which quietly return a partial list. The defining Power Apps failure.
Dataverse or SharePoint chosen on volume, relationships and licensing rather than on which was easiest to start with.
Packaging work so it moves between environments and can be rolled back, instead of being edited live in production.
Knowing which connectors are premium and costing that into a design before the rollout rather than during it.
Connections on service accounts, documented owners, and apps that survive the person who built them moving on.
A live conversation in English, every time. This role sits with business users constantly and the requirements arrive verbally.
The costs here are specific and they arrive together.
Delegation is the technical one that catches everybody. A canvas app querying a large data source only processes the first tranche of rows unless the query can be delegated to the back end. The app does not error. It shows a filtered list that looks complete and is not, so a user searches for a record, does not find it, and concludes it was never created. There is a warning in the editor, and it is routinely dismissed because the app works fine against the two hundred test rows in the table.
Licensing is the commercial one. Standard connectors are covered by common Microsoft 365 plans. Premium connectors — including Dataverse, SQL Server and anything custom — are not. Teams build a solution on the assumption it is included, roll it out to four hundred people, and discover the per-user cost at the point of deployment rather than at design. This is a design-time decision with a very large downstream number attached.
Then there is lifecycle. Apps built directly in production, edited live, with no solution packaging and no separation between development and live use. There is no way to test a change safely and no way back if it breaks. When the app matters, that is an operational risk sitting inside something everybody believes is a spreadsheet replacement.
Maker / Developer (2–4 years). Builds canvas apps and flows to a defined requirement. Comfortable with connectors, forms and basic Dataverse. Works inside conventions set by somebody else.
Senior Developer (4–7 years). Designs the data model, chooses Dataverse or SharePoint deliberately, handles delegation and performance at real volume, and packages work into solutions with a proper path to production.
Platform Lead / Architect (7+ years). Owns environment strategy, data loss prevention policies, licensing design and the rationalisation of what already exists. Decides what belongs on Power Platform and what should be built properly elsewhere.
Governance and rationalisation. Bringing an estate that grew organically under control. The most common senior engagement, and the least likely to be staffed internally. Where it reaches beyond the platform, a solution architect often leads it.
Building a business-critical app properly. Something that started as a prototype and now needs a real data model, a release process and an owner.
Process automation. Approvals, document routing and integrations across Microsoft 365. Frequently touches SharePoint as the data layer.
Dataverse and Dynamics work. Where the platform meets the CRM. See Dynamics 365 developers, since the two share a data platform and the skills overlap.
Migration off a failing app. Usually a canvas app that outgrew its data source and needs rebuilding on something that scales.
Week one. They inventory what exists. How many apps and flows, which environment each sits in, who owns them, and which ones would stop if a named person left tomorrow. On most tenants this has never been done, and the count itself is usually the surprise.
Weeks two to four. The critical few identified and stabilised — ownership moved off personal accounts to service principals or shared identities, solutions introduced so changes can be tested before they go live, and a data loss prevention policy proposed for the default environment. Alongside that, one genuine delivery, so governance is not the only thing they are remembered for.
The warning sign is a developer who only builds. Power Platform rewards fast delivery and it is entirely possible to add to the sprawl at speed while looking productive. Somebody who does not ask who will own an app after they leave is producing the next thing you will need to rationalise.
Leaving everything in the default environment. It exists for convenience, everyone in the tenant has access to it, and it is not where anything that matters should live. Establishing separate environments early is straightforward; moving a hundred apps out later is a project.
Assuming SharePoint lists scale. They are fine for small, simple data and they hit delegation limits and performance problems well before most teams expect. If the app will hold meaningful volume or needs relationships, Dataverse is the right call — and it changes the licensing conversation, which is exactly why it should happen at design time.
Ignoring licensing until deployment. Premium connectors carry per-user costs that can exceed the value of the app if the audience is large. Establish which connectors a design requires before building, not during rollout when the design is fixed and the users are waiting.
Treating citizen development as free. The building is cheap. Support, ownership, security review and eventual replacement are not, and they land on IT regardless of who built the thing. Fund the governance alongside the enablement or you are simply deferring the cost.
Rates depend on seniority, governance scope, and engagement length. Tell us the role and we will give you a firm number.
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