Automating the toil - Part 2

Being the automation nerd I am, I'll be posting an article for each piece of automation I've setup that brings a specific benefit and outcome, and explaining how it works.

Today's automation: create an Azure DevOps work item from a Teams message

Why?

Quite often, there's gold in our colleagues' messages -and occasionally they could contain just enough to be actionable in their own right. Setting up this flow means you can turn a message into a work item with a click and put it straight into the backlog to be picked up by a team - or to act as a reminder to do something.

How?

• This is actually a built-in piece of automation which you can enable from within MS Teams by clicking on a message, using the 3 dots, and choosing More Actions
• When you do this, it creates you a basic flow in Power Automate
• You can choose to edit this to make it more useful/appropriate for your own needs - specifying the area/iteration paths, setting it up as a child item to an Epic or Feature, change the work item type, add your own tags etc etc