Channell Walker

A Lifecycle for Every Workshop

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One person was running every professional development workshop the team offered. Not just facilitating them. Running them. Building the registration form, setting up the confirmation flow, scheduling reminder emails by hand from a spreadsheet, chasing presenters for their planning documents, uploading recordings to YouTube, copying registration and attendance data into whatever spreadsheet needed it next. The role was designed to be 30 percent logistics. It was running closer to 70 or 80. One person, juggling the timelines of multiple workshops at different stages simultaneously, was the only thing keeping it moving.

They had tried to fix it. The team bought an Asana subscription and built out a full workflow. But Asana ran into IT restrictions the moment they tried to connect it to the Microsoft 365 environment everything else lived in. Leadership wanted data exported as an Excel spreadsheet. Asana couldn’t do it. Data that needed to move between systems had to be moved by hand. Three separate tracking documents emerged because three people needed three different views of the same program. The Executive Director kept something closer to a memo, a quick snapshot of what had been offered across the department. The project manager tracked tasks in Asana. The PD facilitator maintained their own registration and attendance spreadsheet built from the registration form. Most of the data overlapped, but none of it connected, and reconciling it before a meeting fell to whoever needed the answer. More gaps opened. The instinct was to find a better tool. Nobody stopped to ask what the tools they were already paying for could actually do.

The dean had already said as much in a meeting: there was no budget for a permanent position, so scope needed to match the people already on staff. The team heard that as a hiring problem they couldn’t solve, since a search committee wasn’t on the table. Understaffed was true. It also wasn’t the fix. Nobody in the room considered that the scope could match the headcount without a new hire at all.

Channell mapped the full path a single workshop from idea to archive. She found three problems.

The process had no foundation. Every workshop started from scratch: new form, new flow, new emails copied from last month’s and updated by hand. Twenty-three separate manual tasks, most of them invisible until someone forgot one. Channell built the system on Microsoft 365 tools the team already had, finally wired together. SharePoint became the system of record. Power Automate handled every handoff. Forms captured inputs at each stage. Teams carried the internal notifications. Outlook handled everything participant-facing. Microsoft tools are designed to connect to each other. No new subscriptions. No IT restrictions to route around.

The repeatable work was eating the role alive. Most of those twenty-three tasks were identical every single month, just pointed at a different workshop. Channell templatized everything that never changed and kept nine tasks as intentional manual checkpoints, the ones that need a real decision or a human confirmation before the workflow moves forward. Twenty-three tasks that used to stretch across weeks now take about one hour a month.

The data had no single home. Three separate documents meant the same registration and attendance data lived in multiple places, updated at different times by different people, with no clean path between them. Questions from leadership required days of manual reconciliation before anyone could answer them. Channell connected everything to a single SharePoint database and a live Power BI dashboard. Answers that used to take days now take minutes.

The role returned toward the split it was built for. The team didn’t add workshops or headcount. What changed is where the time goes now: more course design work, more of what the role was actually hired to do. The system also made things possible that never had been before: personalized year-end summaries for every participant, automatic milestone badges, and a dashboard that answers questions the team didn’t even know to ask.

Once the system was running, a bigger picture came into focus. Every workshop, learning pathway, and consultation a person completed could live in one record. That wasn’t in the original plan. The architecture made it visible.

Most teams in this situation reach for a new subscription before they check what’s already in the system they’re paying for. How many tools on your team’s invoice are working around each other instead of with each other?