The Aurora Group, ran its staff appraisal process through an Excel spreadsheet that had grown cumbersome and error prone, made harder by two staff groups working to different annual review cycles inside the same file. We replaced it with a Power Apps canvas app, built on Power Automate and a set of interconnected SharePoint lists, that mirrors the stages of the old process while removing the spreadsheet’s fragility. Staff and managers now set objectives, complete reviews, and record wellbeing check-ins through a single app that only shows each person the data they should see.
The challenge
Aurora’s appraisal process was not held together by bad intentions. It was held together by one spreadsheet, and by whoever last understood how its formulas worked. Feedback from staff had consistently flagged the same usability and functionality problems, and the underlying reason was structural rather than cosmetic: a hand-built Excel form has no permissions model, no audit trail, and no way to stop someone overtyping a formula by accident.
The trade-off is that this pattern is easy to miss until you look closely, because the spreadsheet does technically work. Reviews get completed, scores get calculated, and the process limps through another cycle. The cost only shows up as errors that need correcting after the fact, appraisal data that is visible to more people than it should be, and a form that has to be rebuilt and re-checked every year for two groups of staff running on entirely different review calendars: school and service based teams reviewed September to August, and central and senior service leaders reviewed April to March, both living in the same workbook.
Aurora came to us wanting a replacement that kept the shape of the existing process intact for the people using it, while fixing what sat underneath it.
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Why start with a technical review of the existing spreadsheet?
The simplest approach with a project like this is not to start building. It is to take the existing spreadsheet apart first and work out exactly what it is doing before deciding how a Power App should do it instead. We ran a UX and technical review of Aurora’s current appraisal process, checked it against what Power Apps can realistically do out of the box, and used that to compile a high level technical plan. Aurora’s team reviewed and signed that plan off before any development started, and we ran a knowledge transfer session to answer the technical team’s questions about it.
That sequencing matters more than it sounds like it should. Once the plan was agreed, we built the SharePoint lists that would hold the data, then the Power Apps interface on top of them, followed by the Power Automate notifications.
The limitation here, is that a technical review can only surface what is visible in the spreadsheet’s structure. Some of Aurora’s scoring formulas turned out to be doing more work than they looked like they were doing once we were inside the build, so we took the time to validate and rebuild that logic properly rather than carrying it across as is. That is not a criticism of the review. It is simply what happens when years of formula changes have been layered into a single workbook by different people at different times, and it is exactly the kind of risk a spreadsheet carries that a properly structured app does not.
What was delivered
The resulting solution is a single Power Apps canvas app, backed by Power Automate and a set of SharePoint lists, built around the structure Aurora’s staff already knew from the old spreadsheet. In practice, that meant:
- one app, reachable through the same App Launcher, card link, or hub navigation Aurora’s staff already use for other tools, so appraisals sit inside the Microsoft 365 environment people already have open, rather than becoming another link to remember
- automatic sign-on that identifies each appraisee and their line manager from Aurora’s own Microsoft Entra profiles and iTrent HR data, so nobody has to search for the right form or the right person’s record before they can start
- a screen sequence that mirrors the stages of the original spreadsheet: employee details, objective setting, mid and year end review, values review, professional performance review, and a final summary, so the change for users is what they are working in, not what they are being asked to do.
- a permissions model that ties each person’s view to what they should see: appraisees to their own record, managers to their team’s, using the manager relationship already held in Entra profiles rather than a separate access list to maintain
- time bound edit access, added once Aurora identified the need during the build: an appraisee can only edit their record between their review cycle’s start and end date, based on their Active Directory group, with fields locking automatically once the cycle closes and a manual override so designated administrators can extend a specific person’s deadline when there is a genuine reason to
- scoring configuration held in the backend SharePoint lists rather than hard coded into the app, so the objective, values, and performance scores we validated and rebuilt from Aurora’s original spreadsheet formulas roll up into a single overall score, and Aurora’s own team can update the values behind that score each year without needing a developer
- automated reminder notifications at key stages of the process, built with Power Automate, so a review does not stall because a prompt got missed in someone’s inbox
- a wellbeing check-in, added after the initial plan was signed off: appraisees choose from four wellbeing statements after each review meeting and can add a comment, folded into the existing review screens rather than built as a separate page, so the sequence staff already knew stayed intact
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Why it mattered
For Aurora, this was never really a project about replacing one file with one app. It was about moving a process that mattered, staff appraisals, off something that depended on one person’s understanding of a set of formulas, and onto something the organisation owns outright.
Left as it was, the cost of doing nothing would not have shown up all at once. It would have kept showing up as small errors that needed correcting after the fact, as appraisal data staying visible to more people than it should, and as a spreadsheet that had to be rebuilt and rechecked from scratch every year for two review cycles it was never really designed to serve at the same time.
Aurora signed the project off happy with the initial outcome. As the appraisal cycles have run since then, feedback from the people actually using the app has been collected and fed back to the project team, and that feedback is shaping ideas for improving and extending the experience further. That is a good discipline to build in from the start. Let real appraisal cycles tell you what to improve next, rather than guessing at it before anyone has used the app in earnest.