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My role as the editor of this blog is to find stories, structure them and make sure they are read by people who can benefit. It is an engagement role, not a technical one.
But I am tech-curious. I have worked in tech and data roles in the past and seen first-hand how thoughtful data structures and automation can make workflows quicker and more reliable.
Getting a blog post from idea to publication involved a surprising amount of admin. For our small team, doing much of this manually meant less time to spend developing and sharing brilliant stories.
We spent most of our time looking for informationI’ve used automation tools before and I know the first thing you need is well organised data to build automations on. Data isn’t just the figures we use to evaluate our work. It also includes the documents, emails and deadlines we work with every day
Our information was spread over several locations and applications. For example:
status in Microsoft Planner approvals in emails drafts in Sharepoint objectives and audience in our heads readership information on a Data Studio dashboard any instances of follow-up or engagement either in our heads or in a Sharepoint documentThe information was scattered across our systems making it difficult to answer simple questions like “who has approved this blog post?” and “where should we be sharing that blog post?”. It was hard to gauge the blog’s success because all we could easily see was how many people viewed the post, but not how they acted on it.
In short, we were spending a lot of time tracking down information, that we could have spent sharing brilliant stories.
This is not a problem unique to publishing. Many teams manage processes through a mixture of documents, inboxes, task boards and unwritten knowledge.
The tidy upThe first step of the reorganisation was to create a single Source of Truth for the blog. We created a Sharepoint List that would quietly house all available information about blog posts, showing just a neat, useful subset to us as a status board. Each item on the list was linked to a draft document, a group of authors and stakeholders, and a senior approver.
At a glance, we could see where every blog post was in the publishing process, who was writing and reviewing it, and whether it had been approved. Linking list items to draft documents saved us searching through document folders for files named after titles that might be changed and authors that might hand over to others.
Bringing this information together freed up time that was once spent looking for things. However I wanted to go a few steps further.
A little more automation, a little more actionPower Automate is a tool that allows even mildly tech-curious folks like me to build powerful automations without using a single line of code.
Once I had my all-important Single Source of Truth, I had a reliable foundation on which to build automations.
For example, when a card is moved from the “Draft” status column to “Senior Approver Review”, a Power Automate flow looks up who the reviewer should be, grants them access to the linked draft document and sends them an approval message. All the reviewer has to do after reading the draft is add some comments and select “Approved” or “Rejected” in the email. For our team this is a much quicker process than manually granting access and composing an email. It also removes ambiguity from the response.
Every time I celebrate a new automation win, I get asked by colleagues, “How do you know where to start?”
My response is: every time I repeat a task, copy information from one system to another, chase someone, or remind myself what should happen next in a sequence, I have found an opportunity to automate.
I start by writing the process down and identifying the information it depends on and what triggers each step. This is the beginning of a Power Automate flow.
Each Power Automate flow saved us a little bit of time, but the biggest effect on the blog was how we used that time.
Telling stories to the right peopleThe most significant thing we’ve noticed since adopting the Sharepoint List and adding automations is that blogs get published much quicker.
Previously, we were so busy with administrative tasks that we didn’t have much time to discuss ideas with the people who suggested them. Complete drafts would land on our doorstep needing significant edits to shape them to the intended audience and objectives. There would be a lot of back and forth between our team, the author and approvers, slowing publication down. Now we can invest lots of time upfront to supporting people in turning their ideas into well-structured, relevant and compelling stories, meaning they are approved more quickly.
Handing the admin tasks over to Power Automate has also improved our ability to multi-task. We can now accept and support more ideas simultaneously, making our team more approachable and useful to the whole directorate.
The biggest benefit we’ve seen isn’t that an approval email now sends itself, it’s that we are spending less time administering content and more time improving it.
Has automation boosted readership?In short, no. We haven’t seen a significant increase in page views since introducing the automation. However, we are using more of our spare time to tailor the way we share our blog posts to suit the author’s individual objectives. Instead of sharing links with a broad, generic audience, we are targeting niche communities to identify people who will genuinely benefit from it and want to join the conversation.
Now we are seeing more engagement between our audience and our authors, including comments, follow-up messages, and even invitations to speak at events. Importantly, we have a central location to record that engagement and follow up.
The biggest lesson wasn't about automationYou don’t need to run a blog yourself to benefit from what we’ve learned. Whatever team you work in, and whether you consider yourself to be “technical” or not, there is probably a process in your workflow that you could automate.
In our case, trying to automate tasks taught us that the information our tasks depend on needed to be organised. As it turns out, even Comms teams need solid data structures. Organising our data was the most important step in freeing us from cumbersome admin.
There are still more tasks in our workflow that could be automated, and every new automation reveals new ways in which we could improve our data structures.
What process could you automate?Pick one process that you or your team does repeatedly. Ask yourself what information the process uses, where it lives, what triggers your tasks and which parts of the process require someone to manually find, copy, chase or update something.
You may have found your first automation. More importantly, you know what information to build it on.
seen at 14:51, 20 October in Digital trade.