CHHS Communications Project Request Workflow

MS Tasks (by Planner and To Do)

With each submission the user can select one or more of the following Projects:

1. Graphic Design

2. Photography

3. Social Media

4. SOURCE News Story

5. Video

6. Website

7. Other

A separate task will be created on the Communications Project Requests plan/board for each project type selected with the submission.

Assignments are made based on the table under the MS Teams section of the page. *When a person is assigned a task, they will receive an email from Microsoft Planner. They should keep an eye out for these emails! They will also receive an email notification when a task is past due.

Access tasks for submitted project

1. Sign in to MS Teams

2. Click Teams on left

3. Click “CHHS Team: Unit Communications Reps”

4. Click “Project Requests” channel on left

5. Click “Communications Project Requests” tab at top

6. You will see 7 buckets on the board that match the different project types

7. Tasks are created under the project type buckets

Move task from Communications Project Requests board to working project board

1. Hover your mouse over a task

2. Click the ellipse in the upper right

3. Select “Move Task”

4. Select Plan Name from the dropdown (there is a working project board/plan for each area)

5. Select Bucket Name from the dropdown (most project boards are using academic unit names for the buckets)

6. Make any adjustments to the task like assigning additional users within the communications team and most importantly set a DUE DATE so that assignees receive alerts when tasks are due or past due.

MS Teams

When a project request is submitted, a message is posted to the Project Requests channel in Teams and the project lead(s) will be @mentioned in the post. 

Currently this is how the notices and assignments are set up:

Power Automate

When a project request form is submitted there are three automated workflows that run:

1. Post New Project Request to Planner and Teams for CM – DM – HES – HDFS – RDC

2. Post New Project Request to Planner and Teams for OT – FSHN

3. Post New Project Request to Planner and Teams for SOE – SSW

*We had to create three separate flows because a only 500 actions can be performed in a single flow

Access workflow

Sign in to Office 365 with the chhs_communications@colostate.edu account. Password is stored in KeePass.

1. Click the app launcher in the upper left

2. Select PowerAutomate from the list of apps

3. Click My flows from the sidebar menu

4. Hover over the flows to view the name

Edit workflow

1. Hover over the workflow

2. Click the pencil icon to edit the flow

3. The first action performed “When a new response is submitted” is to get the Form Id from the Comms Project Request MS Form

4. The next action is to Initialize an array variable called ProjectType that will hold the Project Type values from the checkbox field on the MS Form

5. The bulk of the work is done in the third action in the flow which is a loop “Apply to each”

6. First grab the list of responses from the form. Format form output takes the values from the checkbox field that would look something like this "["item1","item2","item3"]" and replaces commas with pipe, left and right brackets with nothing to end up with item1 | item2 | item3 etc. Then Split previous output into Array gives us ["item1","item2",item3"].

7. We can then iterate through that array for the rest of the actions so now we’re looking at the “Apply to each 2” loop. Take the outputs from the previous step and append to array variable.

8. Next step is to determine which academic unit was entered on the form.

9. Next we determine what the current item is from the ProjectType array

10. Then determine if any supporting materials were uploaded with the form

11. If there were supporting materials the Parse JSON Supporting Materials action creates an array to pull in all the associated items for that field so that we can get the name and link

12. Next step is to create a planner task which pulls academic unit and submission time from the MS Form

13. Next we update task details for the task that was just created and we’re pulling in the project description from the MS Form and then the name and link for the supporting materials from the JSON statement above.

*If there are no supporting materials the the create task action runs same as above and update task action runs just with fewer fields to update.

14. Finally, the Post message in a chat or channel action runs placing a message in Teams and mentioning the project leads for that particular project area.

15. The last action to run is terminate to stop the flow.

View workflow run history

1. Double click on the workflow to see the details and run history

2. After a flow runs you can see the details of the flow to help troubleshoot if the flow failed

3. Double click on the run to open the details

4. The Error Details are listed on the right hand side

5. You can then drill down to the section where the flow failed and you can see the inputs/outputs that caused the error