In this article, we’ll recap and review the Power Platform solution built for my wife’s self-employed beauty business. This will act as a bit of a prelude to another article about the state of digital transformation & empowering others.
My wife has recently started her own beauty business. She originally planned to use an old school paper-based diary to schedule and manage appointments, and use carrier pigeon or chalk & slate for some other stuff. We had some discussions around making as much of her admin as digital as possible. Unfortunately, neither Microsoft Bookings or 3rd party apps from an app store ticked the boxes. But there’s this thing called the Power Platform, so we’ve embarked on building a solution that caters for her needs.
This has served as a bit of an education for the wife who, despite telling her loads of times in the past 13yrs+ what I do for a living, still thinks that I just “work in IT”. To some extent she’s not wrong, but just goes to show that she never registered any of the successes I’ve waxed lyrical about in recent years.
I’ve therefore attacked this build as I normally would in my working world, in a hope of giving her a better level of understanding of my day-to-day, but also teach her a few bits too. I love empowering others with Low Code tools – especially those not typically from an IT background, so the biggest goal of this personal project was to upskill someone close to me.
Building blocks
The first place to start, as always, should be the requirements. From there, we ensured we had the infrastructure in place to support building a Power Platform solution in the first place; so that’s an environment strategy, ensuring we are using solutions, setting up environment variables & understanding how our data tables relate to each other.
For the build itself, we tackled both common and unique challenges to provide the functionality needed. We covered simple re-usable components, building calendar functionality, capturing data and triggering automated actions.
We even had some time to play around with and learn the Parse JSON function in Power Fx. Admittedly, perhaps a stretch too far for my wife at the time, but she understood the end goal and why I chose that route. It also ended up being the most popular blog of the series, so happy days.
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Lessons learned
Not so much learned, but had it re-confirmed that my wife is super tolerant of my warped sense of humour. She’s also very patient, as not many would put up with their husband putting embarrassing images of them across the internet. Purely to highlight how brilliant she is, of course. It had nothing to do with me thinking it would be funny.
The thumbnail for the time-based calendar blog has been a particular highlight. That was also the thumbnail where I genuinely thought I was going to get murdered in my sleep, she wasn’t too impressed. It actually comes from a family shot of us being silly with one of my daughter’s hairbands, I look equally if not even more hideous:
Jokes and stupidity aside, this was a great project to take on. My wife & I are lucky in that we’ve always been on the same page with most things, so there were no arguments or terse conversations. It was pretty easy going to be honest, but most importantly – fun! I have and will always love two things when it comes to low code & the Power Platform; 1. building solutions, and 2. empowering others to build solutions. Both boxes well & truly ticked with this series, so the fun was easy to achieve. I also learned a few new bits on the way too, the time-based calendar techniques being one of them. I love those niche challenges to get the brain into gear!
If I had to take a key lesson away, it would have been to plan the Power Automate flows better first; there was a lot of “add this in, oh no take that out, add this in instead, oh I forgot we need this too”. I can easily build an app out in my head before starting, but I can’t always envisage a flow until building it. But the raw concepts are there and still easy to help someone else understand them.
The future
It’s very pleasing that the solution is working really well. It’s been actively used for the past 2 months as the wife has transitioned into self-employed life. There are a couple of tweaks we need to add to the email body of confirmed appointments, plus lots of nice-to-have’s. One of those is what I’ll be working on next – a simple graph to show £££ by month. I’ll likely throw an additional article up at some point when that side of it is done, I just need to get my head around GroupBy as it’s not something I’ve used much.
I do laugh though, because I’ve had a couple of instances of the wife saying “it doesn’t do this, can you fix it?”. Yes, it doesn’t do that because YOU NEVER SAID IT NEEDED TO!! I’m sure most, if not all developers & consultants will have experienced that one.
Conclusion
I appreciate for some, looking at a screen all day means you have little appetite to do so in your spare time too. That said, I bet most of you simply swap one screen for another in your downtime. So for us, using our spare time to build this solution was a worthwhile investment. I’ve built a few things for the wife in Power Apps in the past, but this was the first one where she was hands-on.
I’m hoping it will inspire the wife to build a solution for one of my requirements too! Here’s some ideas I’ve already floated as to what she could build next. Maybe one of these Power Platform solutions will be a future blog series, assuming I’m still alive after she reads this.
> When she moves my things around the house, doesn’t tell me where she’s moved them & expects me to guess, a solution to help with that.
> A solution to stop her moaning about how much money I spend on craft beer (which she then ends up drinking).
> A solution that stops her talking when the Grand Prix is on.
To finish, I did ask her after the build if she has a better idea now of what I do for a living.
“Yes…. but you still work in IT, right?”
