Kirk Liemohn is a Principal Software Engineer at ThreeWill. He has spent nearly a decade helping clients transform and migrate their content from one platform to another (typically to Microsoft 365) with a focus on the more complex scenarios. Prior to his transformation focus, Kirk led several key SharePoint integrations at ThreeWill including Jive, Polycom, and Confluence.
Here at ThreeWill we are “all in” on Power Apps and Power Automate. I have a particular affinity towards Power Automate. Something about having an automated process without having to lift a finger piques my interest.
When talking about the Power Platform with others, I usually like to focus on how it saves time. With a little effort upfront, it can take tedious tasks and do them for you giving you time back in your day to focus on more important things.
However, I think we sometimes overlook other benefits of automation. It can do things for you (without forgetting to do them) and it can do them consistently.
For example, I am in charge of a status report for a team of consultants, and I need to get their regular feedback on their accomplishments for the week. We have a Team for our group, so I would simply start a conversation soliciting their feedback. They provide their feedback and I incorporate it into the status report. This breaks down if I forgot to make the post.
We’re human. We forget things. It happens to me even when I create reminders in my calendar. I get caught up in work and sometimes I forget to do a task or do it too late, even if it could have been done quickly.
After posting my message late last week, I knew I had to take action. It took me about 15 minutes to write a simple flow to post a message to my Team. It would have been quicker, but I researched how to @mention a tag in Teams to make sure my team members were notified (something I had never done in a Flow before).
Did I save time doing this? I suppose so, but it will take a few weeks for me to have a return on my investment since it only takes a minute to make the post each week.
In this case, the real benefit is that I will consistently get this post created without forgetting. It will even happen when I am on vacation! Now I can relax on the beach with my cocktail knowing that Power Automate has my back 😊.
Hopefully, this gives you ideas on how a little automation can help you be more effective at your job.
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