Work automation starts with the problem, not the tool

On October 6 and 7, I taught a two-day Microsoft Power Automate course at LG Uplus.

There is a question I often think about while preparing a course.

Why do we learn Power Automate?

The goal cannot be to learn as many features as possible. We learn the tool so that we can notice a problem in our own work and find a better way to solve it.

That is why I try to include real company cases when I prepare training material. I want to understand what problem the company had, why the old process could not solve it, and what changed after the company introduced automation.

Laris Hotels in Poland is one example. Its property management system could not provide aggregated booking data across its hotels. Employees had to download Excel files for each hotel and combine them manually, a process that took hours and was performed only once a week.

The company used Power Automate Desktop to collect the data every day and save it to SharePoint. The data could then be used in Power BI reports. Automation gave Laris a way to get the data it needed without immediately replacing the existing system.

I built the exercises for the LG Uplus course around a similar flow.

The participants automated the process of downloading data from a web page. They then classified work data according to a set of conditions and shared the result through Outlook.

We could have learned each feature separately. Connecting them in one workflow made it easier to see how automation could fit into an actual task.

After the course, I found myself thinking about another part of the problem.

Learning how to use Power Automate does not mean that someone will immediately know what to automate in their own work. Learning the tool and finding the right problem are different things.

How can I help close that gap?

This is what I want to think about more as I prepare future courses. I do not want to stop at showing people how the product works. I want to help participants look at their own work, find an opportunity for automation, and try applying one small automation after the course.

I do not have a complete answer yet. But I believe work automation should begin with the problem someone wants to solve, not with the tool they want to use.

Thank you to everyone at LG Uplus who joined the course, to the people who supported it, and to the TeamSparta team who helped prepare and run the two days.