Let’s be honest—when most folks hear “Application Lifecycle Management,” their eyes glaze over faster than a January window in Edinburgh. But stick with me, because what Nevermore Technology is doing with ALM and Microsoft Power Platform is actually impressive. And, dare I say, quite clever.
This is the first of 12 blogs where we’ll follow Nevermore’s slightly ambitious, highly strategic journey as they roll out five separate Dynamics 365 instances, each covering different bits of the business. We’ll be diving into everything from canvas app chaos to form merge nightmares, and hopefully saving a few souls from learning things the hard way.
ALM—Application Lifecycle Management if you’re fancy—is all about how you manage apps from the minute someone says “I’ve got an idea”, through development, testing, deployment, and eventually keeping it all alive in production without breaking anything.
In the world of Power Platform, ALM includes:
Basically, it’s how you keep the wheels on when you’ve got dozens (or hundreds) of apps flying about.
Nevermore isn’t messing around. They’ve split their digital estate across five Dynamics 365 instances—and no, that’s not excessive when you look at what each one’s doing. It’s smart. It avoids clutter. And most importantly, it means each area of the business gets the right tools with the right level of control.
Here’s what they’ve got:
The place where leads are chased, customers are nurtured, and someone’s always asking for “just one more field” on the form. Full of Customer Insights Journeys, lead scoring, and campaign automation.
Tickets, SLAs, chatbots and enough case data to melt your SQL brain. This one’s high-stakes—support teams don’t like downtime, and neither do the customers.
This is the command centre. Power Platform Pipelines, ALM Accelerator from the CoE Starter Kit, governance tools, and the place where all the rules live. Or at least try to.
More than 50 canvas apps, all doing important things like managing assets, booking field workers, or tracking coffee supplies (probably). Keeping these updated without ALM would be like herding cats—blindfolded.
Fifteen model-driven apps, deeply connected to internal systems, external services, and a fair share of APIs. Think of this one like mission control for business operations.
And every single one of these instances has its own set of Dev, Test, Pre-Production, and Production environments. That’s right—20 environments in total. Because if you’re going to do this properly, there’s no room for “just deploy it and hope.”
Now, some might say five instances is a bit much. But let’s be clear—Nevermore didn’t do this for fun. Each area of the business has its own lifecycle, team, pace of change, and sometimes even different regulatory requirements. Keeping them separated makes deployments cleaner, testing safer, and governance tighter.
What ties it all together is ALM. Solutions (managed and unmanaged), source control strategies, branching models, and pipelines keep the chaos in check. The real trick isn’t just building apps—it’s updating them without breaking half the business.
This blog series will take you through Nevermore’s whole ALM journey—warts, wonders, and all. We’ll talk about:
You’ll learn the practical side of all the official guidance but with far fewer buzzwords and more actual use cases.
Next up: We’ll dig into environment strategy. Why Nevermore didn’t just use the Default environment (hint: because they’re not maniacs), and how separating out your lifecycle makes everything a lot less painful.
If you’ve ever wondered how big orgs manage Power Platform at scale—or if you’re quietly planning your own empire—this series is for you.