Development of internal tools

Development of internal tools¶

I see myself as adaptable, scoping out what is possible given the current constraints, and building a process up around that.

An example of this is the way we feed Parabola brand files. In an ideal world, we would be able receive the files in a standardized way. But we don't live in an ideal world.

Different people receive the files, in different ways, but usually on email. When I became part of the team, it had already been established, that we share files with Parabola using emails.

Emails are great, but...¶

It quickly became clear to me that using emails to trigger our Parabola flows is not ideal. After ideating over it for a while, I decided on that sending the files through Teams would be the easiest way we had available.

Teams?! You might be thinking. Yes, Teams.

As mentioned before, it would be better with a more streamlined approach. But compared to having 70+ emails to remember, and having to go look them up every time you want to trigger a flow, sending a file to the same group chat every time is far preferable.

This solution also comes with other affordances. For instance, is there something special we need to do for this flow, does it take two input files instead of one, and so on. All of these things we can set up a reminder for.

Teams to Power Automate to Parabola¶

It's a bit of a mouthful, but given the constraints of Parabola, this was the solution I settled on. Doing it this way allows us to keep a 'Contact book' of the different flows and any remarks we might have when triggering them.