¡Hola! Welcome back to another lesson in our series about creating solutions using low-code automation using the Microsoft Power Platform. In our previous posts we have looked at how low-code tools could help us with some simple tasks. In general, they have involved OneDrive, and documents. We also looked at automated approvals.
Listen to a recording of this post:
This time around we will work on something a bit more advanced. We will build a solution that allows a team to automate service request intakes and hand-off of tasks for follow-up by different team members. While the example we will be building is for a team that handles media campaigns, you can easily build your own scenarios for event coordination, school news assignments, etc. This will allow you to engage more in the doing and spend less time checking email, assigning tasks, and sending notifications, which can be time-consuming. In this build we will leverage these Microsoft 365 services:
* the links in brackets will help with background on each.
- Planner [ check this post, Stay on track with Planner and this other one, Create a Plan in Microsoft Planner ]
- Forms [check this post, Create a form in Microsoft 365 ]
- Teams [ check this post, Microsoft 365 Featured App: Teams ]
and, you guessed it, Power Automate! And this is another chance where you, as a Microsoft 365 Champion 🥇, can help others and be a hero. 
🦸♀️🐱🚀
So, let’s set up this fictional scenario. Team Social-Cats handles the media campaigns for the Bobcat Digital Signs Service [BDS]. Organizations that need campaigns created and deployed to the BDS use a web form to submit their requests. Once a request is received via email, a task needs to be created and then assigned, content would be created, approved, and deployed. Team Social-Cats also likes to keep all members in the loop, and since they use MS Teams they post a message in the “Jobs Completed” channel, creating a record of completions. Since Teams Social-Cats collaborates with the BDS service owners, they let them know that a new video has been added to the system and that they need to track its performance.
In the past, the webform would generate an email that would reach the office mailbox. A person had to watch the mailbox and then create a task and assign it, from there it would continuously be moved by hand by people in the team. The entire process was inefficient. If the person with access to the mailbox was out for the day, or even a few hours, they would be delayed in recording and assigning the tasks. And all the task movements would steal precious time from the things that really needed a human touch, the creation of content, review, and deploying. Automating this, even some parts of it, had been a goal for the team manager, but the university coding staff was overloaded with high priority projects and creating a solution for Team Social-Cats was low on their list. So, let’s see how Team Social-Cats can take ownership of their own solutions via low-code by leveraging Power Automate.
After brainstorming, the team figured out they could save time by automating some parts of the process and they focused on the following:
- Have the webform create an entry in their planning board. The form will only have two fields for the request, a description of the needed video and the date it needs to start playing in the BDS. Also, the form should only be available to members of the university.
- The planning board will have the following lanes, which reflect the process the team follows:
- Incoming Requests 📽
- Production ⚙
- Review ✒
- Approved ✔
- Completed 🥇
- When the request is created in the board have it automatically assigned to the current coordinator.
- The request will be passed between task lanes by hand and once completed, which means it has been deployed, a message will be posted to a Teams channel for record-keeping and to make it visible to the rest of the team. In addition, upon completion of the post, the system will automatically send an email to the BDS service owner so that they can start tracking performance stats for that video.
In this build we will take several new steps. For starters, we will not build our automation on the web, we will build within the MS Teams space that Social-Cats uses for its work. Also, we will build the Form and the Planner inside the Team Social-Cats Microsoft Group. We do this instead of using our individual accounts so that team members can manage all the elements. This is important in case someone leaves the team, so all the workflow blocks don’t go with the person that leaves.
I hope that you are familiar enough with MS Teams to complete the first steps without instructions.
Setting up Teams
- Add a channel called “Incoming Requests”
- Add a channel called “Completed Jobs”
Set up Planner
To begin with, let’s create a Microsoft Planner environment. We will use a Kanban Style board to track the movement of individual requests. Each lane of the board is associated with a step in the process. In this case we will use four lanes:
- Incoming Requests 📽
- Production ⚙
- Review ✒
- Approved ✔
- Completed 🥇
Once Team Social-Cats has set up their planning board, they will need a form to get project requests. They will use a simple Microsoft Form to collect them. It will have only two fields, a long text field to collect project information, and a date by when it needs to be pushed. The form will be configured so that only people in the organization can use it. This means that customers will need to login, and in the process, the form will capture their names and emails, so there is no need to ask the customers to fill those in.
At this point Team Social-Cats has all its elements in place to build their automation. Let’s recap:
- They have set up two channels in the team. One is to capture requests and one to track completed jobs.
- They have their request form in place.
- They have their tracking board in place
So here are the automations they will build using Power Automate:
- An automation will be created to assign the coordinator to new requests as they land on the board. They could have done that as part of the next automation, but by doing it as a separate automation, it will assign it to the coordinator anytime a new task is created, whether it is added from the form or added manually.
- A separate automation that is triggered by a new response from the form and creates a new task in the Incoming Requests lane. I will use the job details and the email of the requester to populate the title. In addition, it will assign it a pink flag as a pending request. It will also set the due date for the task using the requested date.
- A third automation will look for completed tasks. It will be triggered when someone clicks the completed checkbox. It will trigger two parallel processes. One will submit notification in the Completed Jobs channel and another will send the email to the support team.
Consider all the steps that Team Social-Cats has saved here. How many clicks, copies and pastes, and emails and notifications were all condensed with a little investment of time and planning.
Best of all, it was done with low-code / no-code. Let’s see the process in action.
Keep it up. You are moving forward. We are thinking about a Power Automate Challenge, so get your thinking cap on.
In the meantime, keep in on the </low.code> 😉.
Dr. Carlos Solís is Associate Vice President of the Technology Innovation Office.
