Brainstorming and Gathering Your PowerApps Business Requirements

Is your company growing but you still want to ensure that your culture stays intact? Many IT companies are expanding at a rapid rate, including us at Pragmatic Works. We have amazing employees and our culture is very important to us. In our eyes, culture is much more than an inspirational poster on the wall.

Our HR Manager, Kim Stinehour, wanted to have a place where employees could give a shout out to someone else in the company with a compliment or acknowledging a job well done. She wanted one spot to easily create a shout out that could be shared across the organization.

I knew that PowerApps would be a perfect fit here. All our employees are Office 365 users and creating an internal PowerApp for shout outs was the way to go. In this session, we will brainstorm and build the application on a whiteboard and then digitally whiteboard it as well in the mockup software Balsamiq.

Here’s how our brainstorm went:

• Kim wanted the homepage to show all the shout outs from the most recent to the oldest with a picture, name and title of the person giving the shout out and a brief subject of the shout out (“Great job” for instance). Sort of like a Facebook feed page.
• We have 6 culture points that we care about (see our About Us page on our website). So, we wanted to add a line that stated which one of the culture points the shout out pertained to.
• Geeks are notoriously competitive, so I thought it would be a good idea to include some kind of leaderboard on this to gamify this a bit and add some healthy competition. Our leaderboard will be broken into our 6 categories of culture and we can see who is leading getting shout outs in each category over a one-year period.
• One cool thing about PowerApps is that this will work on mobile devices, which will encourage people to do quick shout outs.
• Our goal is to keep this app super simple to use as if there’s any kind of barrier, people won’t use it. We’ll insert an add (+) button on the homepage which will open a new page with employees’ names and a search bar. In PowerApps, this feels like a nested gallery where you can search an employee directory using Office 365, then choose from a list of the culture categories and then fill in the form to complete the shout out; so, a 3-step process.
• Once the form is complete, I will set it up to trigger an email, or even a text, to the employee to alert them of the shout out given to them.
• Once we’ve finished our whiteboard, it feels like a SharePoint list. Kim can now build this in SharePoint with an easy to use form. PowerApps then easily integrates with SharePoint.
• I then go into a tool called Balsamiq where we can build a mockup and collaborate. This can help us flush out ideas by seeing the app in a more visual way before we create it.
• Once the mockup is complete in Balsamiq, I can send it to Kim, and she can add any annotation before I begin coding this in PowerApps.

There are some great templates available in PowerApps, but where Kim wanted to do things a bit differently, we wanted to build this from the ground up. And in my next few videos, I’ll be building this live so you can see this application being built. Be sure to check those out!

Looking for help with development but don’t have the budget or need for a full-time developer? With our Shared Development offering, we can give you a developer on-demand at a fraction of what you would pay for a full-time developer.

We’ll set you up with new expert development time, for a week or each month or a year, whatever your need may be, with the same developer plus 8-hours of support on-demand. Click the link below or contact us to learn more about this incredible offering. We can help you gain the benefits of using PowerApps, or the complete Power Platform, in your organization—just give us a call, we’d love to help!