For months, I’ve logged into PowerApps and seen this “Let’s Make a Plan” thing and thought that it must just be some kind of Task App. The other day, I took a closer look at it and was blown away by what it could do out of the box.

If you are a CRM/PowerApps Developer solely focused on configuration, you might be a little put off by this as it’s basically doing 80% of your job, but I’m a firm believer in that the remaining 20% you do is what people hire you for. And if you have more time to do the 20% along with a few updates and tweaks to what is already proposed to you in the PowerApps Plan, more power to you.

Without putting any thought into what I was looking for – this is what I typed – “I need to create an app that tracks sports used by athletes and their ages and how long they have that sport”. Not a particularly well-written prompt but enough to get me going.

Upon writing that little prompt, a complete data model, canvas, model-driven app, and solution are generated for me along with all the required components – tables, business rules, Power Automate flows, and security roles.

As I said, this is the initial boilerplate work of what PowerApps developers do in assessing requirements, building structure, customizing forms and apps, and then showing to the user. I did a demo for some of our business team members and generated a sample with existing tables in less than 5 minutes.

When generated, the plan also included some dummy data to get things started, which was great for a demo.

Although this implementation wasn’t being used, it was good to see the integration with pre-existing solutions to publish objects using your Publisher, which is great to see.

I know with our Power Automate flows we have some patterns and practices we follow for logging, readability, and implementation, so it would be interesting to see how that would apply against an engine such as this.

In short, I don’t think I’m at the step where I’m going to let users start implementing plans in Production, but when it comes to working through requirements this is a great tool for implementing changes on the fly and letting users see them in action.