Learn how to automate your business process

Do you want to use Power Automate to automate your business processes but don’t know where to start? Are you a pro developer looking for the best practices for planning and delivering a business process automation or RPA project? Or are you a Power Platform expert on your team who wants to help other people in your organization thoughtfully plan and execute a project with Power Platform?

Today is your day! We have just launched a new set of documents to help people learn how to automate their business processes with Power Automate – https://aka.ms/StartPowerAutomateProject 

In these new articles, you’ll learn about the five basic steps of automating with Power Automate, using the best practices and knowledge from Power CAT (Customer Advisory team). The articles focus on the non-technical aspects of automating business processes with Power Automate, such as how to plan your Power Automate project, how to discover automation areas, how to assess business value, etc.

Whether you’re a businessperson who has never participated in an automation or RPA project before, or you’re a “full stack” developer who wants to use Power Automate to bridge between cloud services and legacy systems – this set of articles is for everyone who wants to learn or upgrade their methodology for business process automation projects.

We recommend that you start from the introduction and read through the document step by step. Or, you can jump to one of the five main sections as described below.

Planning Phase

This section focuses on gathering important pieces of information, getting requirements for the business process you want to automate, and planning a software project. There are also business aspects covered, such as optimizing business processes and executing business value assessments. These best practices have been documented directly from our Customer Success teams. These are the same steps for planning a project for Power Apps, and so we have put the documents together. Link to the planning phase

 

Designing phase

This section is split to two sections: Process design, which covers the grand design of the automation prior to working on the technical aspects. Architectural design, which covers the fundamental architecture: determining which automation methods to use, securing your data, reducing risks from errors, etc. Link to the designing phase

 

Making phase

This section guides you to the relevant documentation for setting up Power Automate cloud flows and desktop flows. Link to the making phase

 

Testing phase

This section covers the testing strategy, as well as an introduction to tools and settings to help you test your automations. Link to the testing phase

 

Deploying and refining phase

Lastly, this section covers how to make sure the apps you created are used, ensuring users have the right visibility to the apps, and making sure feedback is collected so you can enhance the app in future. Link to the deploying and refining phase

We are planning to continually evolve these documents for better guidance. If you have any feedback to the documents, please feel free to make a feedback comment in the docs!