Understanding the High-Level Approvals Process
In this section, we will explore the high-level approvals process that supports a team development model with tests. This process ensures that when changes are ready for deployment, they are thoroughly reviewed and approved, leveraging a decentralized model that integrates with business processes and DevOps investments.
Team Development Model with Tests
The team development model involves collaboration across business, IT, and risk teams to build and test solutions. This collaborative approach ensures that solutions meet business needs, are technically sound, and comply with risk and compliance requirements. Key aspects of this model include:
- Collaborative Development: Teams from different departments work together to build and test solutions, leveraging their unique skills and expertise.
- Skill Optimization: Each team member’s strengths are utilized to ensure efficient and high-quality outcomes.
- Cross-Functional Teams: Members from business, IT, and risk departments collaborate to achieve common goals, fostering communication and ensuring well-rounded solutions.
Deployment Process
When changes are ready for deployment, the deployment process includes several key steps to ensure that changes are thoroughly reviewed and approved:
- Highlighting Changes: The deployment process includes the ability to highlight changes made to the solution. This ensures that reviewers can easily identify what has been modified and assess the impact of those changes.
- Summarizing Tests: A summary of the tests that have been run is provided as part of the deployment process. This summary includes details on the test cases executed, the results, and any issues identified. This helps reviewers understand the testing coverage and the quality of the solution.
Decentralized Approval Model
The high-level approvals process leverages a decentralized model, allowing approvals to be integrated into business processes and extended with Power Automate Cloud flows. This approach provides several benefits:
- Integration with Business Processes: Approvals can be integrated into existing business processes, ensuring that they align with organizational workflows and requirements.
- Power Automate Cloud Flows: Power Automate Cloud flows can be used to automate the approval process, streamlining workflows and reducing manual effort. This integration allows for seamless coordination with DevOps investments, ensuring that approvals are efficiently managed.
Coordination with DevOps Investments
The approvals process is designed to coordinate with existing DevOps investments, ensuring that changes are thoroughly reviewed and approved before deployment. Key aspects of this coordination include:
- Source Control Integration: Changes are managed using Source Control integration, allowing teams to track modifications, collaborate effectively, and maintain a history of changes.
- Automated Workflows: Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines are used to automate the testing and deployment process, ensuring that changes are validated and deployed efficiently.
- Risk and Compliance Management: The approvals process includes checks for risk and compliance, leveraging the solution checks, data policies and security models of Power Apps and Dataverse to ensure that solutions meet regulatory requirements.
Assessment
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Conclusion
Understanding the high-level approvals process is essential for ensuring that changes are thoroughly reviewed and approved before deployment. By leveraging a decentralized model that provides guardrails and allows integration with both business processes and DevOps investments, organizations can streamline the approval process, reduce manual effort, and ensure that solutions meet business needs, technical requirements, and compliance standards. This approach enables teams to collaborate effectively, drive innovation, and deliver high-quality solutions that support organizational goals.