Power Platform ALM and Pipelines Implementation

One solution lifecycle, end to end: development, test and production environments with Dataverse; Managed Environments enabled where your licences cover the users; a custom pipelines host with the Power Platform Pipelines application and one pipeline with test and production stages; a pre-deployment approval on production with delegated deployment so makers never need production rights; the pilot solution restructured under your publisher with connection references and environment variables; Dataverse Git integration binding the development environment to Azure DevOps (or GitHub, in preview); the pilot promoted to production as a managed solution and validated by its owner; a licensing findings memo; and a deployment runbook, one-page maker guidance and a handover session. Three weeks, $3,950 fixed.

Yes, and it is the decision to make before anything else. Pipelines require every target environment to be a Managed Environment, and Dataverse Git integration requires the development environment to be one — so every environment in this lifecycle is managed. Microsoft's rule is that every user who runs an app or flow in a managed environment holds a qualifying premium licence: Power Apps Premium, Power Apps per app, Power Automate Premium, pay-as-you-go, or a Dynamics 365 enterprise licence; Microsoft 365 seeded rights are not enough. We read your entitlements against the pilot solution's user list in week one and put the gap, if any, in writing with a decision per user group. We do not enable Managed Environments over unlicensed users and hope.

Microsoft's Managed Environments licensing documentation, as checked in September 2026, says administrators started receiving Microsoft 365 Message center notices in March 2026 about users of managed environments who lack an appropriate licence, end users started seeing in-product notices in June 2026, and from February 2027 those users are blocked from opening apps in managed environments. If you have already seen the notices, the licensing memo in week one tells you exactly who they are about; if you have not, the same memo keeps you from earning them once these environments are managed.

Not necessarily Premium. Power Apps per app licenses a user for one app, and pay-as-you-go meters app use to an Azure subscription in your tenant without assigning a licence at all; both qualify for managed environments, and a Power Automate Premium or Dynamics 365 enterprise licence qualifies too. We model the options against the pilot's real user list and name the cheapest compliant one in the findings memo. Buying it is your decision, at Microsoft's list price whether through us or anyone else; we do not purchase on your behalf.

Azure DevOps is generally available for Dataverse Git integration and is our default. GitHub support is a Microsoft preview feature at the time of writing: it works, but it needs a GitHub App with its private key held in an Azure Key Vault, and Microsoft's preview terms apply. We recommend GitHub only where your developers already work there and you accept the preview status. Because Git integration lives in the development environment only, choosing Azure DevOps now and rebinding to GitHub later touches neither test nor production.

For personal experiments, that is a governance decision — environment routing and default-environment restrictions belong to the governance engagement. For anything the business depends on, no: it gets a solution in the development environment and reaches production through the pipeline. The maker guidance is one page: build in development, inside the solution, using connection references and environment variables; commit; request a deployment; never edit production. Makers keep their autonomy in development. What changes is that production stops being where they experiment.

The pilot is one of them: we move it into a proper solution, promote it through the pipeline, and retire or freeze the original once the business owner signs off on the production copy. The rest are inventoried in week one with a recommendation each — next through the pipeline, leave in place, or retire — and each subsequent solution is a small fixed-scope add-on or your team's own work with the runbook. Moving a canvas app or cloud flow between environments is a solution export and import with connections re-established through connection references, not a lift-and-shift, which is why the restructuring week exists.

The host is a Dataverse environment that stores the pipeline definitions, security roles and run history — the control plane. Microsoft auto-creates a platform host for personal pipelines, but it is limited to one source and two targets, cannot be extended with approvals and cannot be shared, so a governed pipeline needs a custom host, which we create. Microsoft recommends four environments — host, development, test, production — and supports a minimum of three; we build four so approvals and history sit apart from the solution itself. Every one needs a Dataverse database, and Dataverse for Teams environments cannot take part.

When a maker requests a deployment to production, the gated extension on that stage — pre-deployment step required, or delegated deployment with approval — puts the request in a pending state and fires a Power Automate flow that sends an approval to the named approver. On approval the flow signals the host and the deployment runs under the service principal or stage owner identity, not the maker's; on rejection it stops, with the note in run history. Run history records who requested, who approved and what was deployed. Test can stay ungated so makers iterate quickly; production is where the gate belongs.

No — and after this project they do not need it. Delegated deployment means the deployment runs under a service principal or the stage owner with rights in the target; the maker only needs the Deployment Pipeline User role in the host and maker rights in development. Admins keep production; business users get the app as a managed solution nobody can edit in place.

An agent that belongs to the pilot solution is solution-aware and travels through the same pipeline as the apps and flows around it, with the same environment variable and connection reference discipline; Microsoft has extended Git integration into the Copilot Studio maker portal as well, and we confirm in week two that every component in your agent is a supported type. What this engagement does not do is govern agents as a class — who may publish, to which channels, with what data access. That is agent governance, and we wrote up what it is and why your business needs it in 2026; building agents is Custom Agent Development with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

The fixed price covers one tenant and one solution lifecycle: development, test and production environments plus the pipelines host, one custom pipeline with test and production stages, one production approval with delegated deployment, Git integration for the development environment to one repository, one pilot solution restructured and promoted end to end, the licensing findings memo, the optional starter build definition where you already run Azure DevOps or GitHub, and the runbook, maker guidance and handover. Quoted separately: additional solutions, additional pipelines or stages such as a UAT or hotfix stage, Dynamics 365 or Power Pages lifecycles, pro-code CI/CD, and bulk data migration. Licences, Dataverse capacity and any Azure consumption are always yours.

Three weeks: discovery, decisions and environments in the first; solution restructuring and source control in the second; the pipeline, approvals, the first promotion and handover across the second and third. The usual delays are licences and capacity that have not been bought when Managed Environments is due to be enabled, a pilot chosen without its business owner's time, and approvals that sit — they move the calendar, not the fixed price.

Governance decides where things live and what they may connect to — environment strategy for the whole tenant, DLP, routing, cleanup, the Center of Excellence; that is Power Platform Governance and Center of Excellence Setup. ALM decides how one solution moves from a maker's change to production — environments for that lifecycle, pipelines, approvals, source control; that is this page. Many customers do governance first and ALM second; some start here because one app became critical faster than governance arrived, and the environments we create fit the model the governance engagement later formalizes. Azure DevOps and GitHub CI/CD Pipeline Implementation is for pro-code teams shipping application code and infrastructure to Azure; it shares the platform choice with this service and nothing else.

Every environment in the lifecycle — development, test, production and the host — needs a Dataverse database and draws on your tenant's Dataverse capacity; premium licences carry capacity entitlements, and large tables or file-heavy solutions may need capacity add-ons. We state your capacity position in week one before creating anything, and we do not buy capacity on your behalf.

Your team owns the lifecycle with the runbook and maker guidance — the next solution should not need us. If your Microsoft licensing runs through IT Partner, break-fix questions about the pipeline afterwards fall under the unlimited business-hours support that comes with that relationship; putting further solutions through, or adding stages, is project work quoted as a small fixed-scope add-on; month-to-month environment administration is Managed Power Platform Governance and Support. There is no lock-in: everything we build is Microsoft's own tooling in your tenant, documented so anyone can run it, and you can stop using our services at any time.