My name is Anton - I work in project delivery, where a large part of my day involves coordinating information between email, project management platforms, and the people responsible for reviewing and responding to that information.

Over the last several months, I’ve become increasingly interested in a simple question: How much of the administrative work surrounding project delivery can be automated?

That question has led me deeper into Microsoft Power Automate and the broader Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Rather than learning automation through isolated tutorials, I’ve been trying to build solutions around problems I actually encounter in my day-to-day work.

This blog is where I’m going to document that process — what I build, what works, what doesn’t, and how individual automations can eventually connect into a larger end-to-end workflow.

This first project started with a very simple problem...

📥 The Problem

Over the past few weeks, I've had an avalanche of Requests for Information (RFIs) and submittals coming in from our Contractor through the construction project management platform Procore. Those notifications are mixed in with the normal volume of project emails, coordination threads, design discussions, meeting follow-ups, etc. I wanted a simple way to separate the items that were actually being placed in my court from everything else.

I developed a basic Power Automate flow that monitors my Outlook inbox for Procore notifications and automatically creates a task in a dedicated Microsoft To Do list whenever an RFI or submittal is assigned to me for action.

Example Procore notification.

🔁 THE AUTOMATION

The automation looks for specific wording within the Procore notification, identifies whether the item is an RFI or Submittal, extracts the number and subject, and sends it to a dedicated Procore task list.

Right now, I’m using variations of phrases such as:

• “Ball is in your court”

• “Ball is now in your court”

🚦 Trigger logic: These phrases are simply the trigger criteria and can be changed to whatever wording is useful for an individual project or workflow.

Power Automate flow

✅ THE RESULT

The end result is a simple running checklist in Microsoft To Do, separate from Outlook:

Dedicated Procore task list in Microsoft To Do

For me, the value is straightforward: I can keep this list open in a separate window and quickly see which RFIs and submittals still need to be reviewed and distributed to the appropriate team members. Once I’ve handled an item, I check it off and it drops off the active list.

💡 WHY I’M SHARING IT

It’s a very basic flow, but it has been surprisingly useful.

More importantly, this is just one use-case. The same concept can be adapted to other project needs by changing the sender, key phrases, information being extracted, or the final destination. Similar flows could be used to capture review requests, approvals, action-required notices, recurring coordination items, or other email-driven tasks.

Also, this is a first step in collecting actionable data from emails that can then be used to drive additional automation. More to come…

🚀 WHERE I'M GOING

The task tracker solved the immediate problem, but it also gave me a starting point for something much larger.

I’ve since duplicated and modified the original flow so that, instead of only creating a task, it also captures the underlying information contained within the Procore notification. I’m currently collecting a larger sample of RFI and submittal emails so I can better understand how the data varies and determine what can be extracted reliably.

The next step is to take that structured information and redirect it into SharePoint logs rather than manually entering it.

The types of information I’m currently evaluating include:

• Document type

• RFI or submittal number

• Subject

• Date received

• Due date

• Specification section

• Procore record link

• Other useful metadata that may be consistently available

Once that information is being captured reliably, the possibilities become much more interesting.

Instead of the workflow ending with:

Email → Microsoft To Do

the goal is to begin moving toward:

Email → Structured Data → SharePoint → Monitoring → Routing → Reporting

From there, I want to explore automated review reminders, reviewer routing, workload tracking, project reporting, and eventually a more connected end-to-end project delivery workflow.

I’m still very early in the process, and I expect plenty of trial and error along the way. That’s part of what I plan to document here.

For now, the next challenge is simple:

How reliably can I turn an incoming project notification into structured data that other automations can use?