Meeting Costs and Power Apps

"Time is what we want most, but what we use worst" - William Penn

Over the past few weeks I have heard the issue of meeting value come up several times. My working week is typically filled Monday to Friday with various different meetings, and amongst NHS Managers, my meeting schedule is probably on the lighter end of the scale. I at least get some time each (well most) days to do other things like eat lunch or even do work.

It is easy to forget that meetings do have a cost associated with them. The time each person is taking to participate in the meeting has a cost, whether that is to your own organisation or the wider NHS system as a whole. Not only is there the literal personnel cost in terms of salary, but there are also room costs (often multiple rooms these days due to meetings being held virtually whilst room allocated is still pretty static and wasteful), travel costs, food costs, and of course the cost of lost time, which can only partially be mitigated with backfill (which is of course itself another cost).

There are meeting cost calculators available - for example this online calculator is quite a nifty take on the idea as it shows your cost live - but it would be handy to have one more specific to the NHS, or even better, to my meetings. So this article was going to be about the time I created a simple app using Microsoft PowerApps that quickly estimated the cost of a meeting. Conveniently enough I did this over a year ago now so I can just share it here and bam article done. Except... turns out it isn't that simple. 

Upon going to publish the PowerApp and make it available for general use I found that I couldn't, but I could export the package so that others can simply download it and import it into their Microsoft 365 accounts and start using it. 

So I started to pull together instructions on how to do that. Generally I don't use the NHS SharePoint system. Instead I use a local one provided by our GP Federation, which was available much earlier than the NHS SharePoint system and still provides a richer set of features. However this time I would need to use the NHS SharePoint so any instructions I pulled together would work for everyone. So I logged in and... ok PowerApps doesn't exist any more. What is going on?! Now this article is basically going to need to be about that.

What is PowerApps

PowerApps is a no to low code tool for making simple apps. Whilst there is quite a lot of stuff you can do with PowerApps, what matters here is that the very basic stuff, is included in the most basic of Microsoft 365 licenses. These types of PowerApps are called Canvas Apps and are basically interactive spreadsheets. There are more sophisticated apps you can create using different data connectors, but these typically require either a more expensive license or a per app charge.

So if PowerApps are included in the NHS agreement with Microsoft then why are they not available? PowerApps forms part of what Microsoft calls the Power Platform, and a lot of this requires enhanced user licenses. Note a lot of, not all. But it still seems that at least some local IT leads have taken the decision to just completely block off Power Platform usage from their users or to only allow a playground/testing type environment which deletes all apps every few days.

I really do think that this is a great shame and huge waste of opportunity. Canvas apps allow for a lot of creativity, instead of closing off most NHS staff from this feature we should instead be encouraging them to explore it. We could have a vast library of interesting simple utility apps that do things like, for example, tell us how much a meeting is going to cost.

What makes this even worse is that there are plans for PowerApps to incorporate CoPilot, Microsoft's GPT-4 developer AI. Building a PowerApp could soon be as simple as describing the app you want to a CoPilot Prompt. Unfortunately it seems that this is not something many NHS staff will get to experience unless there is a change in strategy.

Meeting Cost Estimator

Unfortunately it would seem many people in the NHS are still unable to access PowerApps. So rather than provide instructions for how to either import a Canvas App (which you can find online) or how to create a Meeting Cost Calculator I will just attach some pictures. We will be doing some PowerApps introductions for staff that are interested in the near future and I hope that the powers that be will begin to realise their potential and utility. I will still include download links for staff that can access a PowerApps environment and would rather just import a working app than create their own. I have also added an Excel version, more to showcase the difference between PowerApps and Excel than to serve as an actual useful tool. See the Downloads section if you are interested in either of these.