Getting ten hours a month back, without a single IT ticket

The problem

One coordinator was doing five jobs at once: attending and minuting recurring meetings, drafting agendas from scratch each time, liaising with marketing and bookings colleagues, handling correspondence with the programme's licensing partner on training schedules and course material, and answering enquiries from hospitals interested in sending staff on the course.

Underneath all of that sat the harder problem: every candidate was somewhere different in a multi-stage journey — enquiry, registration, the three-day course itself, a post-course quality initiative, completion — and there was no shared way to see who needed what communication, and when. In practice that meant candidates were chased ad hoc, by memory, whenever something came to mind rather than when it was actually due.

A CRM, an intake form, or a cloud automation flow would be the usual answer. All three need a university IT department to provision or at least approve them, and that approval step was never going to move at the coordinator's pace. The brief had to fit inside what was already licensed and already running on the coordinator's own PC.

What we built

A full operating system for the role, built entirely from Microsoft Copilot, Word, Excel and Outlook:

• A Copilot prompt library — around twenty tested prompts across meetings, cross-team coordination, licensing-partner correspondence, external enquiries, and general inbox management.
• Meeting agenda and minutes templates, drafted from the previous meeting's open action items rather than from a blank page each time.
• A cross-team coordination tracker covering bookings, marketing, licensing-partner items and general admin in one shared Excel file.
• A candidate journey tracker — one row per candidate, a Stage column running from enquiry through to alumni, and a formula that automatically flags anyone due their next communication.
• Stage-matched email templates, each written to do exactly one job, following a tighter-then-tapering cadence: closer together right after registration, spaced further apart once a candidate is mid-course.
• Mail Merge as the batch-send mechanism, deliberately in place of a cloud automation flow — Mail Merge is a local, decades-old Word/Excel/Outlook feature with no cloud connector, so no tenant IT policy can quietly block it.
• A sector-specific outreach plan, built around the governance and compliance pressure already sitting on the hospital decision-makers this programme needs to reach, rather than a generic training pitch — plus a 90-day content calendar to run it.
• One plain-English README tying every file to a day of the week, so the system runs the same way whether or not the person who built it is the one operating it.

How it went in

Nothing here needed installing, purchasing, or an IT ticket. Every piece was delivered as ready-to-use Word and Excel files, usable the same day on the coordinator's existing PC. The one deliberate constraint threaded through every design decision was that the system had to survive without ever depending on someone else's approval — which is what ruled out Power Automate and Forms in favour of Mail Merge, and what kept new-candidate intake as a simple, direct entry into the tracker rather than a web form nobody could guarantee would stay switched on.

What it means day to day

The coordinator now reviews one tracker once a week instead of chasing candidates from memory, and sends a whole cohort its next communication in one Mail Merge pass instead of one email at a time. Meeting agendas and minutes come from a Copilot draft of last time's open items rather than a blank document. Altogether, that's given the coordinator roughly ten hours a month back — time that had been going into recreating structure that now already exists.

The system also closes a loop that used to run as two separate efforts: every candidate who completes their quality initiative is now a direct entry point into the marketing content calendar's testimonial pipeline, so programme delivery and programme promotion feed each other instead of running in parallel.