My role has two sides to it, a core part of responding to customer data requests to maintain compliance with GDPR and a secondary role building automated tools. It was on Tuesday, with a clear plan for the week focussed on the core role, that I was asked to drop everything to get three distinct tools finished...in just three days.

With little notice, I started clearing the desk of business as usual activities, ready for a challenge which I was really looking forwards to. The three tools in question were all half-built, but all needed considerable time to complete. Freed from any distractions, I could just focus on getting them done.

First up was a tool for categorising and approving business risks. The user would complete a Microsoft 365 Form and a Power Automate flow would manage multiple approvals, updating a SharePoint list as it went and publishing the results to either an email or to a Word document. As Power Automate only allows a number of nested levels, I had split the flow into smaller elements to work around the limitation. I had to fix some outstanding issues, make sure that the tool worked, before splitting out various elements that needed to be duplicated (saving time by fixing issues before duplicating them).

Next up was a tool to help project managers record Data Protection Impact Assessments. I had already built (in Power Automate) and tested the logic that would determine which form a user would need to complete, I next had to rebuild the Flows that would take the details on that second form and complete specific Word documents. Hard work on a small screen, but I managed a near-complete rebuild of the functions that produced the documents.

Those done, I switched again to building the companies policy library. Every major company has documents that make legislation and regulation work at an operational level, but with an increasing number of documents, we needed to better organise them. This was a much simpler task working with SharePoint to store the documents and creating a much easier to navigate front end in our Unily-based intranet.

Three very different tools, in three days. I am so happy with the end result and how both individually and together they will improve business processes.