We regularly meet teams paying for a separate task-tracking tool, a separate file-approval tool, and a separate automation platform — all solving problems that Microsoft 365, which they already have licensed, already solves. Nobody made a bad purchasing decision. Nobody had ever been shown what was actually available inside the subscription they were already paying for.
Why this happens so often
Microsoft 365 gets sold and onboarded as "email and documents." The rest of the suite — Power Automate, Teams' approval workflows, Power BI, Power Apps for lightweight internal tools — gets license access on day one and zero attention afterward, because nobody's job is specifically to teach a team what's sitting unused inside a platform they already have.
The result is entirely predictable: a real business need shows up, someone searches for a tool that solves it, finds one, and buys it — while an equivalent capability sits three clicks away in software the company is already paying for.
Where we see this most often
- Approval workflows built as an email chain or a shared spreadsheet with a color-coding system, when Power Automate can route and track the same approval in an afternoon of setup.
- Simple internal tools — an equipment request form, a basic tracker — commissioned as custom software projects, when Power Apps could deliver something adequate in days, not months.
- Reporting built manually every week in a spreadsheet that someone painstakingly reformats, when Power BI could refresh the same view automatically.
- Basic task coordination run through a paid project-management tool for a team that never uses more than a fraction of its features, when Planner or Teams tasks would cover the actual need.
The actual fix isn't more software
The fix almost never requires buying anything new. It requires someone showing the team what's already available, in the context of a real problem they're currently solving the hard way. That's a fundamentally different kind of training than a generic "Microsoft 365 overview" — it starts from "here's the manual process costing you three hours a week" and ends at "here's the same result on autopilot."
Before your next tool purchase, it's worth asking a cheaper question first: does the platform we're already paying for already do this?