What Happens When End Users Give Up on Their Own Workflows
There is a moment in the lifecycle of almost every workflow where the end users who built it quietly step back and hand it off to someone else. Sometimes that handoff goes to IT. Sometimes it goes to a consultant. Sometimes it goes to whoever on the team happens to have the most technical skills, even if those skills are in an entirely different technology stack.
I have watched this pattern play out dozens of times over my career, and it almost always follows the same arc…resulting in a solution that still runs but that nobody truly owns.
The Handoff Nobody Plans For
Microsoft has done an excellent job of empowering end users to build their own automation. That is genuinely one of the strengths of the platform. SharePoint rules, quick steps, and the low-code capabilities of Power Platform were designed to let business users solve problems without waiting in line for IT.
And for a while, it works. The project manager builds an approval workflow. The HR coordinator sets up a routing process. The team lead creates notification rules. They understand their processes better than anyone, and the tools let them translate that understanding into working automation.
The trouble starts when the workflow needs a change that exceeds the builder’s comfort level. Maybe it is a conditional branch that requires Power Automate. Maybe it is a custom form in Power Apps. Maybe it is an integration with a system outside of Microsoft 365. Whatever the trigger, the end user reaches a point where they say, “I can’t do this. Give it to IT.”
The end users say they are not handling it and tell IT to take over. And IT says they did not build it. Nobody has the time, energy, or expertise to deal with it. So it sits in this uncomfortable middle ground where the people who understand the business process cannot manage the technology, and the people who can manage the technology do not fully understand the business process.
What Gets Lost in Translation
This is the part that concerns me the most. When a workflow moves from an end user to a specialist, the technical skills go up but the contextual understanding goes down.
The business user knew why the workflow existed. They knew the edge cases. They knew which stakeholders cared about which steps. They knew the history of how the process evolved and which workarounds were in place and why. That knowledge is almost impossible to document comprehensively. It lives in the builder’s head, in their experience with the daily work.
The specialist or IT resource can absolutely build a technically sound solution. But they are learning the business context secondhand, usually through a requirements document or a few meetings. The nuance gets lost. And because the specialist is now the only person who can modify the workflow, the end users lose both the ability and the confidence to manage it themselves.
The Handoff That Is Hard to Reverse
Here is the thing that makes this pattern especially sticky: once the handoff happens, it is very difficult to reverse. The workflow has moved into a tool or a level of complexity that the end users are not comfortable with. Even small changes now require a ticket, a request, and a wait. The fast feedback loop that made early automation so effective is gone.
In some organizations, this goes even further. I have seen cases where the only people available with development skills are .NET developers or SAP specialists who have zero SharePoint or Power Platform experience. They can make the workflow function, but the solution becomes completely opaque to the team that depends on it every day. That is not a sustainable model.
A Different Way to Think About It
I am not suggesting that IT involvement is a bad thing. Complex business processes often require skills and governance that go beyond what end users can reasonably provide. The issue is not the handoff itself. It is the unplanned handoff, the one that happens because nobody designed for it.
The organizations I see doing this well think about ownership from the beginning. They ask: who will maintain this in six months? What happens when the builder moves to a different role? Is this built in a way that allows the business team to stay involved, or does it require a specialist for every change?
Those are not technical questions. They are planning questions. And they need to be asked before the first workflow is built, not after the end users have already walked away.
