This case study was written by Emma Davies, Department Coordinator for Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and Design.

Background Context

Within the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, all students are designated a personal tutor. This is a person that they can discuss any course or personal issues with during each semester when personal tutorial sessions are scheduled.  The personal tutorials occur each week of every semester, and all years have two tutorials per semester except for Year One who have three.

For each tutorial, attendance is recorded as well as any comments that students have about their course or anything else they may want to discuss.

I took over as Department Coordinator in 2022 and the system that was being used was as follows:

1. The Department Administration Assistant (DAA) would produce a word document that included a list of students and comment boxes for all units for each Personal tutor. (This would be about 25 separate forms)
2. The forms would be placed in a Teams folder within separate Teams channels for each year by course, so for example Year 1 EEE, Year 1 IMEE and Year 1 RE (there are three courses per year as well as one MSc which involved 13 separate Teams channels). The forms were also added to the X: Drive. The forms were put into separate private folders for each academic.
3. The DAA would send an email to all academics to ask them to access their forms from either Teams or the X: Drive for their tutorial and then return them completed to the Teams channel or the X: Drive or to the DAA.
4. The DAA would then weekly (as the tutorials occurred) document the student attendance on a separate spreadsheet and email individually any students who had not attended. This at times meant contacting around 50-70 students per week.  The email changed depending on the number of tutorials that had been missed.
5. The DAA would then contact academics to remind them to submit their forms.

This process was exceptionally time consuming and took up around a day and a half of the DAA's time on a weekly basis.

This was a process that I really wanted to streamline, and the challenge was to make the process more efficient for staff and students and to reduce the workload for the office.  I only had a small amount of knowledge and no experience of using automation software.

Purpose

When we looked at the actual information that was being collected and what we needed to achieve it became clear that it was a process that could possibly be automated.  There was no requirement for manual parts of the process to be carried out by a person - it involved a high workload and was a standard and repetitive process.

The DAA who managed this process was leaving and it seemed like the perfect time to streamline the process, the office would no longer have the capacity for the workload it involved. It wasn’t efficient and didn’t run smoothly so had many issues as it ran.

Approach

The process was evaluated in collaboration with Clare and after reviewing the necessary steps, a flow was built on Power Automate for the first year group. The workflow used Approvals (a Microsoft app), Microsoft Lists to keep the data, and several conditions in Power Automate to tell the flow to carry out certain actions depending on the response from academics.

Here is a screenshot of one of the Power Automate flows including a condition that is checking the date of the first tutorial against today's date - further down, there are conditions for other meeting dates:

The first process now works as follows:

1. The list contains the following elements: tutor name, tutor email, student name, student email, tutorial dates, tutorial attendance for each date, attendance comments, absence count.
2. Power Automate checks whether any of the dates in the list match today's date. If there is a match, and tutorials are taking place when the flow is triggered, a series of actions will follow.
3. Power Automate sends a personalised Approvals email and notification to the relevant academic to ask them if a specific student attended the tutorial. They can choose from 3 options: Present, Absent, Excused. Comments are optional but can be added to share any necessary information with the admin team.
4. If the student is marked as Present or Excused, this is reflected in the MS List and nothing further happens. If the student is marked as Absent, an automated email is sent to notify the student that they missed a tutorial. Important links (MyTimetable and Student Support) are included and they are reminded to attend the next tutorial.
5. Each time the flow runs, any absences are counted so that the emails sent to students are modified depending on how many times they have missed a tutorial.
6. There are different lists for each year group and the administrative team are able to see a complete overview of tutorials using this tool. Once the flow is triggered the process now takes minutes to complete instead of the days previously.

The second flow works as follows:

1. Microsoft Forms are set up with the names of units listed as questions.
2. On the date of tutorials, tutors are sent an email via Power Automate containing a link to the correct form for them to complete. They fill it in based on the tutorial discussions and since it is a summary of the group, any comments by students are reported anonymously. The results are collated in a spreadsheet which is accessible to the administrative team and departmental leaders. This cuts out any downloading, moving, and saving of individual files as the necessary information is centrally compiled.

Results and Outcomes

The results of the automation have been excellent.  We have had positive feedback from all academics, and it has given them the ability to analyse data and any comments made by students more effectively as it is all now accessible in one place to review.

We have found that the comments recorded are more detailed as academics can complete the forms and attendance during the tutorial and seem to be able to complete the comments forms more efficiently.  Academics have reported that it has saved them quite a lot of time as before they needed to locate their form, fill it out after the tutorial as the form was not easily accessible and then send it to the office.

The office is saving around a day and a half each week as all that is involved now the process has been set up, is flows to be triggered each week-this takes me 5 minutes per week to do, so this is now one manual step weekly compared to five (please see background context).

Due to the improved accessibility of the information both for the attendance and feedback, it has been much easier to modify information during the process and correct any issues that arose.

There was initial push back and a reluctance for change from some staff which was understandable, but the process speaks for itself and with the support from Clare and the fact that the new process spoke for itself we have had 100% positive feedback.

Benefits and Limitations

The pros of the approach and experience:

• Introduced me to power automate and the capabilities it has. It is a great tool for me, and I hope to develop it as much as I can.
• Reducing 36 hours of work weekly to 5 minutes weekly.
• Providing accessible data that can be reviewed so efficiently.
• We have a process that works efficiently in the background that I can monitor easily in between doing other tasks.
• Increased student and staff participation.
• Allows academics to spend more time focusing on the tutorials and has given them the ability to tailor the feedback forms as the semester progressed, adding anything they needed to.
• It has been a more inclusive process-previously being managed by the office it is now a collaboration between us and the academics.

The cons of the approach and experience:

• Initial set up involved more work (providing student lists) but this is not really a con as I was fully supported by Clare and now that it has been set up we are ready for the rest of the year and subsequent years.
• The process can be complicated involving the flows initially and if you are not used to it then it can seem like another language, but this improved as I learnt more during the process.
• I cannot think of any other cons.

Recommendations

• Have a clear idea of what you need, what you want to achieve. Look at your processes carefully as there are probably many that you could automate-I have realised we can save a lot of time and effort this way.
• I had excellent support from Clare at every step, but I would definitely advise learning as much as you can from Clare- Clare did tutorials and involved me at every step so I could see how it works.  I need to learn an awful lot more about the process but understanding it a little helped a lot.
• It has been a positive experience so I am not sure I would do anything differently next time except maybe being clearer about what we needed from the start.  It has given me more confidence for new processes such as this and now I just want to learn more.

Further reading

• Get started with Power Automate - Power Automate | Microsoft Learn
• Get started with Power Automate approvals - Power Automate | Microsoft Learn
• Trigger approvals from lists created with Microsoft Lists - Power Automate | Microsoft Learn