Trying out rotation and notification automation for duty rosters with Power Automate

Hello!
I'm Baakoshi, and I love company events and gifts! 😊

If I only write about my private life, people might start doubting if I actually do IT work, so I'll talk about an automation project I implemented a while back!

At the time, I was involved with a system that managed HR information, and we were rotating the roles of work facilitator and meeting minutes taker every two weeks.

It might be hard to visualize what a work facilitator is, but they are essentially a simple team leader😎
When inquiries come in or system issues occur, they are responsible for checking the team's workload and assigning tasks to members who are free.

It's a very interesting initiative, isn't it?

It's a common scene in teams with highly motivated members, but when a problem occurs, new members who lack confidence hold back and in the end, the leader, who is an expert, ends up solving it quite often 💦

However, when you give them the role of work facilitator, the person themselves stops holding back, and the atmosphere becomes one where everyone watches over them, which creates an environment where it's easier for new members to learn the ropes ✨

However, when we rotated roles on a weekly basis, there was the problem that just as they were getting used to it, it would change, so they wouldn't really learn it.
Therefore, we decided to rotate every two weeks.

But, while we could remember the duty roster without recording it when it was weekly, once it became two weeks, we suddenly started forgetting more often, haha.

"Wait, is it the second week now?"
"Wait, who is the next person after the rotation?"

and so on.

Because of that, I got tired of the effort of remembering every time, so I decided to create a duty roster.
But since we were forgetting the duties every two weeks, we would also forget to maintain the duty roster.

So, I decided to

automate the maintenance and notification of the duty roster!

This is where the tool I mentioned in the title, Power Automate, comes in.
This is a free tool provided by Microsoft, and anyone with an account can use it.
Also, the advantage is that you can easily access and edit Microsoft apps like Excel, Teams, and Outlook ✨
It's also attractive that you can do it by clicking around on the screen without writing any code.
Even those without programming experience can handle it!

When you say system engineer, I think there's an image of someone writing code intensely.
I hold the highest level (Gold) certification for the Java programming language, but no matter how experienced someone is, writing code takes a fair amount of time.
So, if you can easily create it without writing code, there's no reason not to use the tool.

Back to the topic, the goal is to update the Excel duty roster every two weeks and notify via Teams.

The process flow is as follows ↓

Let's look at it from top to bottom.
First is the schedule setting.
I decided to notify at 13:00 on Tuesdays every two weeks.

Next, I created a process to move the work facilitator (labeled as "Moderator" in the diagram) from the top to the bottom of the duty roster.
It looks difficult, but it's just deleting the first 'A' from an array ordered A, B, C, D, adding it to the end, and making it B, C, D, A.

Finally, it's complete once you notify Teams with the first column of the duty roster as the work facilitator and the second column as the minutes taker.
There are confusing function names like 'variables' and 'take' written, but they are all in the help, so you can do it if you follow the instructions 😊

This was my first project using Power Automate, so there were some parts where I struggled, but I succeeded in automating it in about 2 hours of work time.

When the number of members increases, you just add them to the duty roster and they will be automatically included in the rotation from the next time, so it's highly maintainable, and it was well-received by team members ✨

Regarding this automation,
I explain the detailed steps in the following article,
so please take a look ✨

Includes steps! I tried rotating and automating notifications for duty rosters with Power Automate

Also, besides duty rosters,
I have written about a case study using Power Automate for wikis as well 😊
I explain the detailed steps, so please take a look ✨

I tried maintaining wiki content ○○