Client Background
As the UK’s busiest airport, Heathrow is on a journey to give every one of its 3 million monthly passengers the best service in the world. A progressive organisation with a mission to make flying more sustainable while serving over 80 long-haul destinations.
Problem
Heathrow has been running its citizen developer program for several years. Digital Champions have been using the Microsoft Power Platform to produce innovative business applications. However, the size and scale of the growth started to raise questions for the Digital Services team:
- How do you scale Power Platform use beyond a group of heavily engaged Digital Champions?
- Is the current Power Platform governance suitable for business-critical applications?
To answer this, Heathrow engaged Dootrix to define a framework for Power Platform Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to scale-up their approach.
Solution
Dootrix worked closely with Heathrow, interviewing stakeholders from across the organisation in an initial discovery phase to assess the existing situation and understand their attitudes toward the Power Platform and the current governance structure.
Dootrix defined a comprehensive new operating model for Heathrow’s use of the Power Platform for application development. Defining a roadmap for how Heathrow can set new standards, guidance and policies for its use of the Microsoft Power Platform, maximising business impact in a secure and well-governed manner.
Based on Microsoft best practices, the Heathrow approach covers the full application lifecycle, from conception, through development and operation once live. It removes manual work with automation throughout, increasing speed while decreasing risk, such as when migrating an app from a development environment to production.
This innovative approach is revolutionising citizen developers’ attitudes to security, bringing a focus to data loss prevention, automated app security scans through Azure DevOps, as well as environment access controls.
The introduction of common development standards is making the Digital teams’ work easier by significantly reducing and simplifying the ongoing support burden for business-critical and non-business-critical applications.
“Our partnership with Dootrix enables us to deliver some really cool stuff. If you want to build the best products you have to start with the partnerships which is exactly what we’ve done.”