Has the pandemic broken your process? It is very much time to fix it.

Firefighting. Not just the IT Crowd that has had to deal with this in businesses during the pandemic. It’s been a fundamental shift from one way of working to another. Were those new ways of working, those processes, and workflows temporary? Do you wait and see? Will things return to the way they were, or will we work in a hybrid agile fashion forevermore?

You see, you’re not alone – every one of us are asking the same questions. Every day we’re firefighting. We’re dealing with the inadequacies of systems we developed for the pandemic. Some have been awesome; some have been less so. We deal with issues those cause on a responsive basis, with much effort and time taken up. Manually doing tasks that we believe are only temporary…

The fundamental question though, is how do we move forward? We constantly find that the general awareness of Workflow Automation tools to be quite low. Believe me if there’s a tedious, repetitive task you do regularly – someone has built a tool to automate it. There’s also the high probability that you already have one that you’re not even using!

As an advocate of low-code, no-code tools – these things are stupidly easy to use and more importantly, if you don’t have your process quite right – they’re easy to change!

Take a step back from the fire, look at the tools you already have maybe get some advice and believe that agility in your processes and workflows is definitely the new normal.

Our suggestions if you think you’ve broken your process – look at what you already have:

  • Office 365 offers Microsoft Power Automate (formerly called Microsoft Flow), which can automate many tedious workflow tasks for free as part of your package.  If you want to do something more advanced, you can upgrade and even automate the transcription of data into legacy non-Microsoft applications.
  • Google Workspace has Apps Script, a bit more advanced and technical than Microsoft Power Automate but can perform similar tasks.
  • Microsoft Power App, again on the Office 365 platform can be used to take tedious forms and make them live and available on the web or mobile devices – and you don’t need to know a programming language!

If you’re scratching your head thinking your process is still broken and all this is far too technical for you – give us a call, we can help! 

For now though, just put the fire with the rest of the fire…