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Solution · IT & servicesEvery project gets its team, site and plan on the day it is approved
Project workspaces provisioned with governance in minutes
One request in Teams creates the team, the SharePoint site, the plan, the labels and the ERP project code, and closes the workspace when the project ends.
Executive summary
Project teams and sites built by hand, named differently every time, and never closed.
We build the path on the Microsoft 365 tenant you already run and add UiPath only where Microsoft cannot reach.
A team, a site, a plan, a project code and a folder tree exist minutes after approval, so work starts the day the project was decided.
Microsoft Teams team and channels; SharePoint project site and libraries; Microsoft Planner plan
Business problem
Collaboration governance
Every engagement needs the same starting kit: somewhere to talk, a library for documents, a task plan, a project code to book time against and a folder in the drawing archive. None of it is difficult work. It is expensive because it is done by hand, by different people, from whatever the last project looked like.
Three roles feel it differently. The project manager feels the wait and fills it with a chat and a personal folder. The administrator feels the interruption: twenty minutes of clicking, eight times a day, between real incidents. The PMO feels the inconsistency: names that do not match the ERP, and a portfolio view that exists only when somebody asks around.
At scale the issue is control, not speed. Guests are added one at a time, sharing links outlive the engagement, ownership passes informally, and nothing is closed because closing is nobody's task. The estate grows with every project the firm has ever run instead of with the ones it is running.
How it works today
A new project space begins life as a service-desk ticket and is assembled by hand from a comparable project.
- PersonA project manager raises a service-desk ticket for a new project space
- WaitingThe ticket queues behind incidents; two to five working days pass
- PersonAn administrator creates the team, copies channels and folders from a comparable project and invites the members they can identify
- SystemA PMO analyst creates the project code in the ERP and the folder tree in the document-management system
- Risk of errorConfidentiality, retention and external sharing are set only if the administrator remembers; partners are added later, one at a time
- PersonCorrections run for a week: a missing channel, a site renamed to the client's spelling, one more external designer
- WaitingThe workspace stays live long after the final report is delivered
Why the current process costs more than it appears
Behind every exception is an hour nobody logged.
- The wait is paid twice: a team that cannot start officially starts unofficially, and somebody later moves that content into the real site and reconciles two versions of one drawing.
- Each hand-built workspace is a permission set nobody has reviewed. Owners leave, guests remain, links keep working, and only an audit or an incident surfaces it.
- Naming drifts, so portfolio reporting becomes archaeology: joining the site called "Client X new" to job 24-0871 in the ERP is a manual exercise every month.
- Small corrections never reach a budget and never stop. Five minutes for IT, a broken hour for the manager waiting, several times per project.
- Nothing is closed, so storage, licences and exposure track the firm's whole history rather than its current workload.
Cost of inaction
Long before the budget notices, the ability to say who can see what is gone. What accumulates is an estate nobody can describe: sites whose owners have left, guest accounts from engagements that closed two years ago, sharing links created because they were the quickest way to send a drawing. None of it causes trouble until it does, and the question is then not what happened but who had access.
It is also why the clean-up gets dearer every month: without enforcement at creation, the gap between how projects should be set up and how they are keeps widening, until closing it needs its own budget.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
European engineering and design consultancy: 1,100 employees in eleven offices, Microsoft 365 E3 with E5 compliance for part of the workforce, a project-accounting ERP and a drawing archive with no API.
About 160 new project workspaces a month across bids, short studies and full engagements; a third involve a client user or an external partner, and one in eight is commercially confidential.
Requests arrive as tickets. An administrator copies the structure from a comparable project, a PMO analyst creates the project code and the folder tree, and classification is set by hand or not at all.
Around 70 minutes of combined IT and PMO handling per workspace across ticket, build, corrections and follow-up, plus two to five working days of waiting.
A form in Teams captures the project metadata, an approver confirms the classification, and Power Automate calls Microsoft Graph to create the team, the Planner plan, the site columns and the labels; robots handle the ERP code and the drawing folders; a scheduled review closes what is unused.
Provisioning takes minutes after approval instead of days, every workspace carries its owner, classification and end date from the first hour, and the dormant tail is reviewed rather than left. The figures are a model, not a measurement.
Proposed solution
We build the path on the Microsoft 365 tenant you already run and add UiPath only where Microsoft cannot reach. The project manager opens a form in Teams and describes the project, not the technology. Power Automate checks the answer against the project register in Microsoft Lists, rejects duplicates and non-standard names, and generates the key that identifies the project everywhere afterwards.
Approval becomes a decision about classification, not about whether IT has capacity this week. The approver sees the metadata and what it produces: a private team named to the standard, a label that blocks external sharing, a retention label on the library, an end date. Everything after that is one sequenced run. A single Microsoft Graph call creates the team from your template with its channels and owners; further calls add the container sensitivity label, the Planner plan with its buckets and standard tasks, the library columns and the retention label. A UiPath robot creates the project code in the ERP and the folder tree in the drawing archive, because neither exposes an API, and writes both identifiers back.
Provisioning is half the problem, so we build the closing end as well. A scheduled flow reads signals that already exist, the last channel message, the last file change, Planner completion, the ERP project status, and asks the owner of a quiet workspace to extend, close or archive it. Archiving writes an evidence pack, removes external guests, applies the retention label and archives the team through Graph so conversations freeze. SharePoint Advanced Management can carry part of this with its inactive-site policies and site access reviews, but it is a separate add-on licence, so the review works without it as well.
Microsoft Forms as a Power Automate trigger; Teams Approvals; a team created from a team template with channels and owners in one Microsoft Graph call; Graph Planner API; Microsoft Purview container sensitivity and retention labels; UiPath Orchestrator queues, API triggers and audit
The form and its rules, the project register and workspace key, the approval path, the provisioning sequence with polling, idempotency and rollback, the label matrix per project type, the two robots, the inactivity review and the evidence pack
Microsoft Graph calls from Power Automate through a scoped Microsoft Entra ID app registration, which uses a premium connector and therefore a Power Automate Premium or Process licence; UiPath robots on the ERP project-code screen and the drawing-archive folder tree
How the automated process works
- PersonThe project manager fills the request form in the Teams tab: client, type, confidentiality, external parties, end date, cost centre
- AutomationPower Automate validates the answer against the register and the naming standard, and generates the workspace key
- PersonThe portfolio approver gets a Teams approval showing the metadata and the access rules it applies, and approves, corrects or rejects
- AutomationMicrosoft Graph creates the team from the template with channels and owners, applies the sensitivity label, creates the Planner plan and sets the library columns and retention label
- SystemA UiPath robot creates the project code in the ERP and the folder tree in the drawing archive, then writes both identifiers back
- AutomationThe requester receives a Teams card with links, classification and what the label allows; failed steps are retried, then raised to IT naming the step
- AutomationA scheduled flow tracks activity per workspace and asks the owner of a quiet project to extend, close or archive
- AutomationOn archive the evidence pack is written, guests removed, the retention label applied and the team archived through Graph
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Validation against the naming standard and the register, and generation of the workspace key
- Creation of the team, channels, owners, site columns, Planner plan and labels in one run
- The ERP project code, the folder tree in the drawing archive and the write-back of both identifiers
- Activity tracking, the review prompt, the archive, the evidence pack and the removal of guest access
People decide
- The classification: confidentiality, whether external parties may be admitted, and the end date
- Exceptions: an unusual channel set, a client structure needing its own site, a project outside the pattern
- Whether a quiet workspace is extended, closed or archived, and who takes ownership when the owner has moved on
- The label matrix: which project type carries which sensitivity, retention and sharing rule stays a compliance decision
Before and after
Systems and integrations
We do not add technology to make an architecture look serious. Every element below has a specific job in this process.
Inputs
- Microsoft Forms request opened in Teams
- the project register in Microsoft Lists
- the PMO naming and classification standard
Automation layer
- Power Automate cloud flows
- Microsoft Graph under a scoped Microsoft Entra ID app registration
- UiPath Orchestrator queues and API triggers
- UiPath Robots
Target systems
- Microsoft Teams team and channels
- SharePoint project site and libraries
- Microsoft Planner plan
- the project-accounting ERP
- the document-management system
Human touchpoints: the request form; the Teams approval; the provisioning card with links; the periodic review card for owners
Technologies used
the request form, opened as a tab in the channel people already use
Avalidation, approval, the provisioning sequence, the write-backs and the scheduled review
Acreates the team from a template with channels and owners, the plan, the site columns and labels; archives the team at the end
Athe classification approval and the provisioning notice with links
Athe project site and its metadata columns, the register, the archive library
Athe project plan created from your task template through the Graph Planner API
Acontainer sensitivity labels for privacy, guest access and external sharing; retention labels
Athe ERP project code and the drawing folders, queued, retried and audited
AIllustrative economic model
What it is worth, with the arithmetic shown.
Read the row below as arithmetic on assumptions, not as a result: the ranges come from project-driven organisations, not from a measurement at a client. The 70 minutes is combined IT and PMO handling across ticket, build, corrections and follow-up, not one person's uninterrupted time; €36 is a fully loaded blended hourly cost in Central Europe. The model shows released capacity only; the waiting days are not priced.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- A team, a site, a plan, a project code and a folder tree exist minutes after approval, so work starts the day the project was decided
- Every workspace carries client, project type, classification, owner and end date, so reporting reads the register instead of asking people
- Confidentiality and external sharing follow the classification the business chose, applied before the first document is uploaded
- External partners belong to a project with an expiry rather than to the tenant, and their access is listed when it closes
- Quiet workspaces are reviewed, closed and archived with evidence instead of being left because nobody dares delete them
- IT and PMO capacity moves from clerical assembly to work that needs judgement, and the portfolio grows without a matching queue
The management view
- Every project space has an owner, a classification and an end date recorded at creation, so the estate can be described without a survey
- Starting a project no longer waits on a queue; the constraint returns to the business decision, where it belongs
- The standard is enforced at creation, where it is cheapest, instead of being repaired later in a remediation programme
- Handover and audit questions are answered from the register and the evidence packs, not from somebody's memory
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Trust in automation is built on the audit trail, not on a promise.
- The provisioning identity is a Microsoft Entra ID app registration holding only the Graph permissions the sequence uses; every call is recorded against the request that caused it
- Classification is owned by compliance, not IT: a project type maps to one container sensitivity label, which fixes privacy, guest access and external sharing before anyone can share a file
- Robots sign in with their own accounts, whose rights stop at a project code and a folder tree; secrets come from the credential store, never from a person
- External access is granted with the project and expires with it; at archival the guests are removed and the evidence pack records who had access, through which links, under which label
- Project content stays in your Microsoft 365 tenant, the robot layer runs in the UiPath Automation Cloud EU region, and the archive keeps its evidence under a retention label
Why now
Search and assistant experiences surface whatever a person already has access to, which turns years of over-permissive project sites into a visible exposure, and permissions are cheaper to set at creation than to unwind later
Provisioning through Microsoft Graph is no longer a development project: a team with its channels and owners is created from a template in one call, and a container label fixes privacy, guest access and external sharing the moment the workspace exists
The modelled €6,720 a month is capacity spent on clerical set-up, and it scales with the number of projects opened, not with the value of the work inside them
Relevant executive roles
Opening and closing a workspace become one auditable path behind a service identity, instead of a ticket queue and an estate nobody can inventory
Every project space follows the same structure, naming and metadata, so reporting and handovers stop depending on who set the project up
Clerical capacity is released, and the storage, licence and audit cost of a tenant full of dead workspaces stops compounding
Common questions and objections
Then part of the work exists, and the gaps are at the two ends: the request with its metadata and approval, and everything after go-live. We keep what works and add the form and the decision in front of it, the review and archive behind it.
They will, for as long as the official route is slower. When approval takes minutes and the result is complete, self-made spaces stop being the fast option, and the rest appear in the register as unmanaged, to be adopted or closed.
The review deletes nothing. It asks the owner one question in Teams with the activity history attached, and the archive keeps content readable under a retention label. Extending is one click, which is why owners answer.
When this is not the right solution
- Fewer than roughly twenty new workspaces a month, where a checklist and one trained administrator cost less than the flow
- No agreed project taxonomy: if the business cannot say which project types exist and what each may share, that classification work comes first
- Creation rights are open to everyone with no intention of changing that, so the flow would provision correctly while people keep building spaces beside it
A question for the next management meeting
If an auditor asked today which of our project workspaces still have a named owner, a classification and an end date, how long would it take us to answer?
Implementation approach
What we deliver, and what we need from you to start.
We deliver
- Project types, naming standard, approvers and the classification matrix, written down and agreed
- The request form and the project register, with validation that rejects duplicates and non-standard names
- The provisioning sequence in Power Automate and Microsoft Graph: re-runnable, with polling and rollback
- The sensitivity, retention and external-sharing settings per project type, agreed with compliance
- The robots for the ERP project code and the drawing folders, with queue, retry and audit in Orchestrator
- The lifecycle: activity signals, the owner review in Teams, the archive step and the evidence pack
- A clean-up path for the workspaces that already exist, prioritised by risk
We need from you
- The project types, with the confidentiality, sharing and retention rule each should carry
- The naming standard and the approver per project type or business unit
- A test area of the tenant, a service identity, accounts for the ERP and the drawing archive
- An owner in the PMO who decides when the standard and an exception conflict
Stages
Discovery
Project types, standard, approvers, and what the legacy systems require
Design
The metadata and label matrix, the form, the approval path, the provisioning sequence
Build
Flows, Graph calls, the register, the robots and the Teams cards
Validation
Real projects provisioned in a test area, rollback and re-run tests, acceptance
Go-live
One business unit first, then the rest, with the old ticket route closed behind it
Lifecycle
The inactivity review, the archive with evidence, a first pass over what exists
Quick win. Effort is driven by how many project types the business will standardise, whether a classification matrix exists, and how much the two legacy systems need doing by hand.
Every project workspace costs 70 minutes to build and outlives the project itself.
Send us an export of the teams and sites created in the last quarter with owners, guest counts and last activity dates. We come back with a picture of the sprawl and the label matrix we would start from.
Inventory last quarter's workspacesThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
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