Ask any IT admin where the week went, and you'll hear the same things: password resets, access requests, tool approvals. Why not automate them with Flow?! The easiest place to start is the everyday work that eats up your time. Most of it isn’t technically hard. It’s slow because someone is waiting on approval from someone who is heads down on something important. This is why the best first automations are well-defined decisions.
Start with the automations everyone’s waiting on
The best automations remove friction that everyone complains about. Look for requests that are:
- High volume. People notice the delay.
- Clear policy. The rule fits in one-two sentences.
- Reversible. If it gets something wrong, it’s cheap to undo.
- Has a waiting step. Most of the time is spent waiting for a person, not doing work.
Ten requests worth handing off
- Lockouts and password and MFA resets, resolved in the same chat thread. An employee asks in Slack or Teams, Flow unlocks the account or resets the password through your identity provider, and they’re back to work without anyone in IT getting pinged.
- Access requests, approved and set up without a ticket. Granting access takes seconds, it’s the wait for the approver that is so frustrating. That’s why Flow routes the decision to approvers automatically and grants access the moment they say yes.
- AI tool credit top-up request. “I hit my limit and need more” is one of the newest and most frequent requests on the service desk, and it grows with every AI tool you roll out. Write one policy for the tool, approve up to a set amount, send anything above it to a manager, and flag unusual patterns for IT.
- New tool requests, before they turn into shadow IT. “Can I use this?” Flow collects the use case, approves tools you’ve already vetted, and sends the rest to the team for review.
- IT onboarding tasks, ready before the first day of work. Describe your checklist in plain language and Flow drafts the automation: accounts, groups, licenses, laptop.
- Offboarding, closed out the same day someone leaves. Suspend the account, revoke sessions, remove licenses and groups, and lock the device.
- Role changes, with access the new role requires. Flow adds the new groups and apps and removes the old ones.
- Temporary admin rights that expire on their own. Someone needs admin rights to install a tool. Flow grants them for a set window under your policy and takes them back automatically when the time is up.
- Licenses and seats, assigned on request and taken back when they’re not needed. Seats get handed out and rarely returned. A scheduled run reviews assignments and takes back seats from people who left or changed roles, with a heads-up first. Finance tends to notice this one.
- Equipment updates and replacements. An employee asks in Slack or Microsoft Teams, and Flow pulls the requestor’s device information, checks company policies, then routes the request for manager’s approval.
Building your first automation
- Write down the policy. “Anyone in engineering can get up to X in AI tool credits” is specific enough to automate. If the rule only lives in someone’s head, start there.
- Describe it in plain language. Tell Flow what should happen, what information it needs, and which systems it touches. Flow drafts the steps and asks about anything it can’t work out.
- Connect only what it needs. Pick the specific connector actions the automation uses, like “assign license,” not broad admin access.
- Add approvals where a person decides. For example, route to the requester’s manager or a team’s managers, before the run starts or at a specific step.
- Test in simulated mode. Try an approval and a denial without changing anything in your connected apps.
- Roll it out to one team first. Start with one team, check run history for the first week, then open it to a larger group.
What to automate next
Every automation you build gives you a “paper trail” for a previously unwritten rule, and that’s often as valuable as the time it saves. When your team solves something new in a conversation, turn it into the next automation. Time savings grow the more you automate.
Which request eats the most time on your service desk? Tell us in the comments, then try Flow free at https://www.letsflow.ai/
