Another automated tool for Legal team, but one that has been really good fun to work on. In common with many internal teams, they ran a mailbox for teams to contact them with requests for help. This creates two big problems – enquiries can be very vague, not having required information and managing the work involves forwarding emails to people. Not great.

The plan was to make a Form that provided different questions depending on the type of enquiry and then have the enquiry land in Planner using Power Automate (all in Microsoft 365). Once I had the questions from the Legal team that needed to be asked for each enquiry, I could then build the Form.

The challenge was the Power Automate at the back – it needed to filter out each type of enquiry and then create and update the Planner task. Power Automate is a very powerful platform and using it to build a big tool is a challenge – what I was planning was far bigger than the standard supplied templates.

Set the challenge of landing it on the Monday, I needed to put a lot of time into it on the Friday – which I was happy to do. The problem came when it was 2200 I was tired and Power Automate would not let me save what I had done as the solution did not work. It was 2330 when I got the bugs ironed out, ready to be tested thoroughly on Saturday morning.

The testing was a hill to climb, having a list of fewer than 10 cases that needed to work, but making sure that all passed. One at a time the tests were run and bugs were found and closed. Every time I fixed an issue, I ran all the cases up to that point again until they all passed.

This may sound really torturous, but it was really positive and exciting – building a tool that would fundamentally change a teams workflow using off the shelf components in a weekend.