Three internal systems in nine months, without a dev team

Confidential · People Operations

The business said

• “Buy three SaaS products and integrate them”
• “Keep running HR on spreadsheets”
• “Staff a full-stack team for internal tools”
• “Outsource each app separately”
• “Let one lean team ship desk booking, recruiting, and appraisals on low-code”

Internal tools did not deserve a product team's budget. They needed a platform where a small team ships one app a quarter.

A low-code suite: desk reservation, applicant tracking, performance management

A global IT services firm had three internal problems that every growing company recognizes. A new office had fewer desks than people, and nobody knew who would sit where. Recruitment ran on fragmented workflows, with candidates tracked across inboxes and spreadsheets. And performance management lived in yet more spreadsheets: manual data entry, scattered feedback, and appraisal cycles that ran late. Three problems, and the standard answers were three SaaS subscriptions or one expensive internal dev team.

Instead, one lean team shipped all three on a low-code platform, each in about three months. A desk reservation system lets employees see availability and book a desk before coming in, with automated notifications handling the administration. Overcrowding stopped being a lottery and desk utilization became a managed number.

An applicant tracking system centralized recruiting: job postings and candidate pipelines in one interface, automated resume parsing, interview scheduling, and notifications that keep hiring panels aligned, all integrated with the company's existing collaboration suite. A performance management system then replaced the appraisal spreadsheets, putting goal setting, assessments, and feedback collection behind one interface with a SQL backend keeping the data consistent and auditable.

The suite was built with Microsoft Power Apps and Power Automate over SharePoint lists and SQL, which is precisely the point: the platform did the plumbing, so the team's effort went into the workflows. Three systems, nine months, no full-time engineering team, and the operational spreadsheets retired one by one.

• 3, apps shipped
• about 3 months, per app
• Power Apps + Automate, platform
• SharePoint + SQL, data
• retired, spreadsheets