Douglas Hubbard
Manager, Power Apps Centre of Excellence, Transport Canada
Ottawa, Canada
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With over 30 years of IT experience in both private and public sector, Douglas joined Transport Canada (TC) in 2014. He has been involved in several major transformation projects as Manager at TC, with a focus on modernizing of technology in support of inspections and regulatory enforcement, breaking IT silos, and beginning with the Navigable Waters Act Renewal Project (NWAR) in 2017, pioneering Agile development and leveraging Power Platform at the department.
As a direct result of NWAR’s success – including winning the 2020 departmental National Creativity and Transformation Award, Douglas was offered the opportunity to found the Power Apps Centre of Excellence (PACE). Since being formed in summer 2020, PACE has become a leader in the Government of Canada when it comes to Power Apps. The PACE team has built numerous critical systems in response to COVID-19 and other department priorities, supported other Professional Developers across government to succeed utilizing the platform, and sponsored the initial blossoming of Citizen Development at TC. PACE was recognized for these efforts in 2021 by receiving the Government of Canada’s “Excellence in Innovation” Digital Government Community Award.
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Using standard templates to create highly reusable Power Pages
The Power Apps Center of Excellence developed a standard Power Pages template that implements the very stringent Government of Canada guidelines for public facing web sites. The standard, based on WCAG 2.0 AA, includes standards on accessibility, usability, interoperability, mobility, multi-language and more.
This highly reusable Power Pages template is shared with 50+ departments and is a great example of how one Department’s efforts can be shared and leveraged by others within the organization.
In this session, the presenter will demo the strategies for creating highly reusable Power Pages templates to meet specific government requirements.
How to take your Citizen Developed Application to Successful Enterprise-wide Deployment
The Transport Canada (TC) Power Apps Centre of Excellences team encourages and enables the business to look to Power Apps to solve specific business problems. TC provides a sandbox Power Apps environment where the citizen developer can do just that.
In this session, we will demonstrate a real-world application built by citizen developers, the process to enforce department-wide standards for accessibility and usability, and to successfully deploy the application enterprise-wide.
Tricks of the trade for supporting Citizen Development
Are you interested in enabling Citizen Development for your organization but unsure of how to navigate this uncharted territory? Transport Canada's Power Apps Centre of Excellence (PACE) has been working at this conundrum for years, and this session discusses what we've come up with. Topics covered include: how to structure your tenant, leveraging the CoE toolkit to both support and effectively monitor Citizen Developers; how training and support needs differ from Professional Developers; defining where Citizen Development is (and isn't) appropriate; how to establish effective Fusion Teams; managing expectations and defining obligations for each "flavor" of development; finding the right governance balance between innovation and risk management; the often thorny question of maintenance; and establishing a development community that can support one another.
Making the most of your default tenant
The default Power Apps tenant is the starting point for a surprising number of activities. Professional and Citizen Developers alike begin there when first trying out the platform - and if you're not careful, they'll start deploying things into Production there too. Power BI and SharePoint users can create content in the default environment and not even know it. Unless you are proactive, the default tenant can quickly become difficult to manage, strewn with all manner of content.
The purpose of this session is to discuss how Transport Canada's Power Apps Centre of Excellence (PACE) has dealt with the default tenant, creating a robust gateway environment that supports Citizen Developers, interested neophytes, people (often inadvertently) creating Power Apps extensions to their Power BI or SharePoint content - all while managing risk and preventing rogue apps in Production and a proliferation of Shadow IT. Find out how to leverage Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and the CoE toolkit to maximum effect, watching for unexpected activity and abandoned content alike.
Finding a place for your Centre of Excellence
In most organizations, your Power Platform CoE isn't the only IT game in town. There could be other teams handling different parts of the platform; CoEs responsible for Office 365, SharePoint, or other technologies; and don't forget governance bodies such as Enterprise Architecture, IT Security, or Project Management. How to go about making everything fit together?
Transport Canada's Power Apps Centre of Excellence (PACE) is ready to share three years of experience working in a government environment building bridges across IT while establishing a strong Power Platform community and breaking long entrenched silos in the organization. We'll cover how teams figured out to effectively co-operate, resulting in better, faster governance, including a client focused and fact based Intake and Assessment process for all new IT undertakings in the department.
Case studies from a successful Power Platform CoE
Transport Canada's Power Apps Centre of Excellence (PACE) has been in operation for three years - and the team has experienced a myriad of challenges. From the care and feeding of Citizen Developers to building a strong Power Platform community in the department and across the Federal government; from grappling with policies, procedures, regulations and governance to keeping top executives happy putting out fires without becoming victims of our success...PACE has dealt with that and more. And we're still here to tell the tale.
The purpose of this session is provide a series of case studies covering some of the most noteworthy highs (and lows) PACE has encountered. Find out what we did, what we learned, and gain insight on how your organization can best deal with the same challenges.
The care and feeding of a Power Platform COE when demand inevitably outstrips capacity
A Centre of Excellence’s work is never done. There are policies to set, infrastructure to monitor, professional IT developers to convince that yes, Power Platform is “for real” (and no, it doesn’t steal babies), apps to build, and best practices to promulgate across the organization. On top of all that, you might be tasked with supporting Citizen Developers – that incredibly vast potential of non-developers with amazing ideas, and not one inkling of the kind of rules and requirements they’re about to run into getting something into Production. How do you look after all that without overworking your team?
This session is for managers and executives who want ideas on how to ensure the best possible culture of success for their hard-working team in the COE, drawn on the experiences of Transport Canada’s Power Apps Centre of Excellence (PACE). PACE is recognized as being in the vanguard of successful Power Platform implementation in the Government of Canada and has won departmental and national awards for their work. Find out how the PACE team is leveraging the PowerCAT Maturity Model and what PACE has done to provide the optimal Power Platform support to everyone – professional and citizen developer alike – while endeavoring to avoid the proliferation of Shadow IT among other pitfalls.
Building your business case for Power Platform COE
Trying to establish a Center of Excellence can sometimes feel like trying to jump a entire flight of stairs at once. On top of the already daunting technical and governance considerations - or the challenges of finding enough skilled resources - you won’t get very far without the support of the people in charge.
This session relates the experience of Transport Canada’s award-winning Power Apps Centre of Excellence (PACE) navigating how to climb those steps one (or perhaps two) at a time; building support, establishing sound justifications, getting the best team you can with the optimal mix of skills and roles, and ultimately the right “pitch” that approves the COE. Target audience of the session is anyone trying to contend with the administrative and managerial challenges of guiding a COE from great idea to reality.
Douglas Hubbard
Manager, Power Apps Centre of Excellence, Transport Canada
Ottawa, Canada
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