What if I told you your developers aren’t drowning in code—they’re drowning in requests? Every department wants something automated yesterday, and the bottleneck is brutal. Now, imagine a world where your business doesn’t depend on a few overwhelmed coders but instead taps into hundreds of citizen developers, creating solutions right where the work happens.
That’s the rescue mission Power Platform was designed for—and the payoff is real, measured in millions unlocked and hours recaptured. Forrester’s research shows multi‑million benefits with rapid payback, and I’ll show you the mechanics: what to prioritize, how governance fits in, and how citizen builders multiply impact.
Because before you get there, you need to see what’s clogging the system in the first place.
The Hidden Bottleneck
Picture your top developers as starship engineers. You’d want them steering energy into the warp core, charting faster routes, powering the grand mission. Instead, many spend their days crawling through maintenance shafts, patching leaks with duct tape, and running constant repairs just to keep oxygen flowing. The brilliance you hired them for dims under endless firefights—because when organizations lean too heavily on a handful of expert coders, those coders become catch-all repair crews, expected to automate for thousands while juggling every new request.
Here’s how it plays out. Every department lights a signal flare—finance wants reports auto-compiled, operations wants routine checks scheduled, customer service wants emails triaged. All those requests funnel into one central bay: the coding team. The queue grows longer each week, and the strain builds. The irony is sharp—automation was meant to make things faster, but the process designed to deliver it slows everything down.
And it isn’t just delay that hurts. Picture the mood inside that waiting line. One team sits for three months hoping for an automation that erases thirty clicks a day. Another waits half a year for a workflow that helps process orders more smoothly. By the time the solutions arrive, business needs have shifted, forcing another round of revisions. Efficiency collapses into frustration. Leaders know the potential value is sitting in those queues; they can almost see it—but deadlines evaporate while teams sit stuck in backlog traffic.
Legacy strategies fuel this pattern. Centralized and tightly controlled, they operate on the belief that only professional developers can handle every detail. In theory, it safeguards quality. In practice, it ignores the wealth of expertise scattered across the workforce. Every role has people who know the quirks of their daily tasks better than IT ever could. Yet they remain sidelined, told automation isn’t part of their job description.
This sets up a paradox. Demand rises as more teams see what automation could save them. But each new request only lengthens the line. Push for speed, and the model gets slower. It’s like trying to accelerate a ship while loading on more cargo—the engine groans, not because it lacks power, but because the demand cycle drags it down. Industry research backs this up: many automation investments sit underutilized because of fragmented strategies and central bottlenecks that choke momentum before it starts.
The scale of wasted opportunity is enormous. Hours vanish into repetitive manual tasks that small automations could erase in minutes. Multiply that by hundreds of employees, carried across months, and you’re staring at the equivalent of millions in untapped value. The treasure is on board, but locked away. And the only people with a key—those overworked developers—are too busy triaging to unlock it.
For developers themselves, morale takes a heavy blow. They studied advanced systems, architecture, design—they wanted to lead innovation and shape the future. Instead they’re reduced to cranking out one-off fixes, tiny scripts, minor patches. They imagined charting voyages across galaxies but end up repainting the same escape pods over and over. Energy that should drive strategy drains away into repetitive chores.
And that’s the hidden bottleneck. A developer-only model looks neat on paper but in reality burns out talent and strangles progress. Requests never stop, the backlog never clears, and the cycle grows heavier with each quarter. What you meant to preserve as quality control ends up throttling speed, leaving the entire organization stuck.
But the harder truth is this: the bottleneck isn’t only about overwhelmed developers. The real cost lies in the majority of your workforce—people who understand their own problems best—yet are locked out of automation entirely.
The Everyone-Else Problem
Instead of your whole crew steering together, most organizations keep the majority standing idle, while only a select few are allowed to touch the controls. That’s the real shape of what I call the “everyone‑else problem.” Enterprises often limit automation to technical elites, shutting the wider workforce out of the process. Yet Forrester modeled extended automation affecting about 66% of staff by year three when a platform like Power Platform is scaled. That’s the contrast—most companies settle for a tiny fraction today, when research shows the reach could extend to a clear majority.
Think about what’s lost in the meantime. Across every floor of the business sit employees who notice the same patterns every day: pulling the same report, reformatting the same sets of data, moving files into folders. These aren’t glamor tasks; they’re low‑value loops that anchor people to their desks. The ideas for fixing them aren’t absent—every worker knows where the waste sits. But without accessible tools, the effort ends in shrugs and extra clicks that stretch into hours each month.
Now picture reversing that lockout. A finance analyst builds a simple flow that assembles weekly transaction reports automatically. A service rep sets up an easy rule for routing follow‑up requests rather than dragging them one by one. None of these are heroic builds. They’re tiny adjustments, “micro‑innovations” created by people who live closest to the work. Yet stacked across hundreds of staff, they unlock thousands of hours. In fact, Forrester’s TEI model included training roughly 1,800 automation builders—non‑technical employees equipped with guardrails and safe tools. That scale proves this shift is achievable, not hypothetical.
Time studies only highlight the absurdity further. When a legacy process is finally replaced with a small automation, whole blocks of time resurface—like a floor vaulting open with hours hidden underneath. And the irony is consistent: the value doesn’t come from reinventing the entire system at once, but from distributing the means of automation more widely. The potential was always there. It was just concentrated in the wrong hands.
The cost of this mismatch is massive. Picture a starship with hundreds of consoles, each designed for specialist crew members. Yet leadership insists that only the captain may steer. Officers stand idle, sensors unused, while the captain juggles every control at once. The ship still moves, but it lurches, slow and inefficient. That’s how enterprises hobble themselves—by misplacing trust and calling it safety.
The reality is that employees outside IT aren’t a liability. They’re frontline sensors, spotting recurring obstacles before anyone else. They feel which parts of their day erode morale, where automation could wipe away friction, and which actions repeat so often that the drain is almost invisible. But cut them off from automation, and that tacit knowledge never escapes. It stays locked inside individual workarounds, while central teams struggle under the noise of backlogged requests.
The solution doesn’t require radical invention. It requires frameworks that make self‑serve automation possible while preserving oversight. Give people intuitive, low‑code tools. Wrap them with governance. Then IT shifts from barricade to guide. The outcome is a workforce that eliminates its smallest pain points without waiting in line—forging new efficiencies safely on the fly. And in that model, central developers gain relief, no longer buried by the minutiae of every department’s workflow.
Ignore this, and the losses compound fast. Each routine click, each repetitive transfer, turns into real money. Extended across thousands of employees, the hidden cost measures in the millions. And yet the solutions aren’t locked in treasure chests far away—they sit right here, inside the daily grind of people who know their work best.
That’s the heart of the everyone‑else problem: exclusion doesn’t protect efficiency, it strangles it. The bottleneck persists, not because of unwilling workers, but because of withheld tools. This is not a people problem—it’s a tooling and governance problem. And until that’s acknowledged, your most skilled developers remain chained to the same treadmill, spending brilliance on tedium instead of charting the paths forward.
Developers as Assembly Line Workers
Why are highly trained engineers spending so much of their time coding like they’re stuck on an endless copy‑paste loop? It’s like recruiting a crew of rocket scientists and then asking them to fold paper airplanes all day. On the surface, they’re still producing useful work. But underneath, their skills are being funneled into an assembly line of minor builds—tasks important enough to keep the ship running, but far too small to justify the firepower being spent on them.
The picture is consistent. A developer with years of training in design, architecture, and system thinking gets pulled into yet another request: a notification set up here, an approval routed there, a formula to clean up data before export. Each one is functional, yes—but together they consume hours that could have gone toward designing resilient systems able to support the business for the next decade. The talent is there, but the organizational model misallocates where it’s used.
Developers naturally want to fix the bigger puzzles: making platforms adaptable, weaving new software into legacy frameworks, laying the groundwork for where the company’s digital infrastructure will be five years out. Instead, they find themselves trapped in cycles of quick requests. This morning it’s setting up a form for HR. By lunchtime, it’s tweaking how sales attach documents in an approval chain. Tomorrow morning? Another minor workflow. The pattern repeats until each day blends into another round of micro‑fixes.
That tension creates a split identity. On paper, these professionals are architects of the future. In practice, they’re treated more like assembly line operators turning out compartmentalized automations—fast, repetitive, limited in scope. It’s like having navigators trained to chart whole star systems but using them to polish viewports so the passengers can see the stars. The result isn’t waste, but misdirection of skill, leaving harder strategic problems without full attention.
And the backlog feeding this pattern never dries up. Each solved task spawns others: new forms, new reports, new routing requests. Solve ten, and twenty more show up. So developers remain locked in cycles of repetition that accelerate immediate workflows but leave long‑term innovation frozen in place. The small things get done faster, but the big questions—how to reduce the very flood of requests that keep developers so busy in the first place—stay unanswered.
When those loops are finally broken, the gains show up quickly. In one study from Forrester, professional developers cut workflow development time by around 20% when using Power Automate. That measurable change demonstrates the broader point: freeing developers from repetitive demands doesn’t just lighten their workload; it unlocks their ability to focus on strategic system‑level builds that create long‑term value.
The hidden cost of keeping them stuck on the assembly line doesn’t appear in any budget. You won’t find a line marked “unused creativity.” But you feel it when strategic projects slip, when integration designs sit in draft longer than expected, when big ideas linger without the bandwidth to bring them to life. Innovation doesn’t stall from a shortage of imagination—it stalls when the people capable of execution are already booked full maintaining endless cycles of micro‑tasks.
Imagine again a starship crew. The explorers meant to guide you through wormholes instead spend whole voyages polishing chrome detail. It keeps the vessel looking sharp, but slows the journey forward. Scaled across hundreds of developers in an enterprise, that drag becomes enormous. Future‑critical goals inch backward, not from lack of will, but because labor is unevenly distributed.
The correction isn’t complicated to explain. Developers should be pilots—steering innovation, crafting architectures, charting design routes. But for that shift to happen, routine automations need to be handled closer to where the work actually takes place. Low‑code tools can distribute responsibility so everyday needs are addressed at the edge, while central developers reclaim the freedom to focus on innovation.
Still, the obvious question arises. Hand these tools to a broader workforce and what’s to stop the process from fracturing into dozens of unsupervised side builds? That’s where the balance comes in—structure, oversight, and governance guide creativity rather than stifle it. And once that structure exists, a new force is ready to emerge inside your organization.
Citizen Developers: The Secret Weapon
Here’s where the conversation turns: the real breakthrough isn’t about squeezing developers harder, it’s about harnessing the rest of the crew. Enter citizen developers—the secret weapon of modern automation. These are everyday employees equipped with low‑code tools, able to build safe, guided workflows from inside their own jobs. Suddenly the people who actually feel the pain of slow processes can be the ones to solve them, without languishing months in IT’s request pile.
Picture it in simple moments. A support rep routes routine inquiries with a lightweight rule instead of dragging messages around all day. A finance analyst sets up a flow that refreshes reports automatically, cutting out weekends lost to manual prep. These are not complex builds—they’re quick fixes, designed by the people closest to the work. Instead of needing years of training, employees follow templates and guided steps inside an environment that’s already fenced in by IT guardrails.
Now, of course, the reflexive fear is chaos. If everyone tinkers, won’t it break things? That anxiety makes sense if you imagine raw code handed out like candy. But that isn’t the model here. The system works because IT sets the rules: Centers of Excellence, admin controls, and environment‑level data‑loss policies give visibility, governance, and built‑in safety rails while people build. Think of it less as unchained access, more as supervised freedom. The fuel lines are still monitored; the ship doesn’t veer off course.
That reassurance has already proven itself. Organizations that moved from developer‑only automation to mixed models didn’t spiral into disorder—they experienced lift. Small fixes multiplied, silos loosened, and productivity gains appeared in places no central team could have mapped from the top down. It looks less like risking the bridge and more like equipping every cabin with safe thrusters all pointing the same direction.
Scale is often the next question. Can a company realistically train that many people? The research says yes. Forrester’s model included hundreds of trained citizen developers in the opening period and a dedicated but lean team tasked with platform governance. That balance kept the system orderly while expanding its reach, showing that the idea is operationally feasible rather than theoretical.
It’s important to stress what citizen developers don’t do. They don’t displace IT, they don’t override security, and they don’t hijack strategy. Their role is to extend IT’s reach. Each employee who automates a repetitive task lifts one pebble off the mountain of backlog. The impact is in the multiplier effect: instead of a few dozen workflows delivered each quarter, an organization gains hundreds—sometimes thousands—of small, cumulative automations. Meanwhile, IT focuses on large‑scale architectural builds. The heavy engines keep running, while hundreds of micro‑thrusters clear everyday turbulence.
Think about the efficiency gains. One person saves fifteen minutes here. Another reclaims an hour there. A department eliminates days of prep work from recurring reports. No single win makes headlines. But added together, they accumulate into vast blocks of recovered time. These aren’t shiny moon‑landing moments, but the compounding effect is undeniable. Citizen developers stack micro‑solutions into a reservoir of saved hours that flows back into innovation and problem‑solving.
In the end, every organization must weigh control against throughput. Legacy approaches protect control by narrowing who can build, but at the cost of throttling speed. Citizen development flips that balance: guardrails remain in place, but the building opens up. What was once bottlenecked in IT becomes a distributed capability across the workforce. That spread doesn’t dilute quality—it strengthens output while protecting governance.
And that is the essence of the model: a thousand tiny automations add up—and IT keeps control—that’s the core of the citizen dev argument. The natural question that follows is the one leaders always ask: alright, but what’s the real payoff when the numbers roll in?
Stacking the Numbers: Proof of Escape Velocity
Numbers tell the real story, and this is where the model proves its thrust—hard evidence that automation isn’t just convenient, it’s financially undeniable.
Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study reported a 248% ROI and a payback period of under six months, with present‑value benefits in the tens of millions and an NPV around $39.85M. That’s not a futuristic fantasy projection; it’s math drawn from scale. It shows how fast momentum builds once automation shifts from isolated pilots into connected systems across the enterprise.
Of course, leaders don’t just want percentages, they want to see the mechanics—where does value surface, and how do those multi‑million returns materialize? The study makes it clear: savings accumulate from a stack of sources. RPA users saved roughly 200 hours a year each, extended automation brought high‑impact users closer to 250 hours a year, developers trimmed 20% off build times, and legacy licensing costs were cut down by consolidation. Expand adoption across tens of thousands of employees, and those hour‑level victories assemble into serious ledger entries.
It’s easier to picture if you frame it as collective time. Strip out low‑value repetition from thousands of daily workflows and you’re reclaiming the equivalent of entire departments’ worth of capacity. Forms don’t wait in queues, reports generate themselves, approvals route instantly, and background processes tick without constant human shove. Add it up: that’s not a handful of saved minutes, it’s hundreds of thousands of hours unlocked for higher‑value work across three years.
And then consider the cost side. Legacy platforms demand expensive renewals and fiddly maintenance, like leaving a crew of engineers babysitting a reactor you no longer need. Retiring those tools and centralizing automation on a single platform means not just cleaner operations, but millions saved in licensing fees. Remove that anchor, and the dollar impact stacks on top of the time gains.
Meanwhile, developers come back into focus. When citizen builders handle the repeatable workflows, professional teams aren’t buried under low‑grade tasks. With Power Automate’s low‑code and AI‑assisted features, developers in the Forrester model cut build times by about one fifth. In practical terms: less wheel‑spinning, faster delivery pipelines, and the ability to redirect technical talent toward strategic system design instead of routine patchwork.
Make no mistake, these changes ripple outward. Hours regained can be reinvested into upskilling, training, and digital fluency, prepping the organization for next‑generation AI and process redesign. The benefit isn’t only operational efficiency now—it’s capacity building for tomorrow’s demands. Forrester’s findings frame this as a compounding engine: cost reductions and freed minutes that fuel a more adaptable workforce, cycle after cycle.
The analogy isn’t one of gradual acceleration but of jumping engines. A coal‑burning craft trudges forward, heavy and wasteful. Swap it for warp propulsion, and suddenly distance compresses with the same fuel. Distributed automation, under governance, flips efficiency to a whole new register—minutes saved stop being incremental and instead multiply across the enterprise grid.
All of this stacks into evidence that’s not abstract. The TEI model’s net present value clears nearly $40M, with benefits valued over $55M across three years. Nothing here hinges on magic thinking. It’s the cumulative math of hours saved, licenses retired, developers accelerated, and processes scaled. When seen together, the outcome is less “might” and more “will.”
And it doesn’t take external auditors to start measuring in your own shop. Power Automate includes built‑in estimators, letting you track the impact of individual flows and project savings toward a business case. You can literally watch minutes and dollars pile up in real time as automation spreads.
The proof is already there: financial, operational, cultural. Numbers stack, waste collapses, and work takes new shape. What follows is not a narrow experiment but a systemic shift. And once you see the mechanics laid bare, the bigger truth comes into view—automation’s future isn’t locked in one central control room, it’s distributed across the entire ship.
Conclusion
The path forward is clear: distribute automation, put guardrails in place, and empower citizen developers so your specialists can focus on strategy. That combination doesn’t just ease pressure—it produces measurable returns that scale across the business.
So here’s a simple move to start: pick one flow, track the hours it saves, or pilot a small Center of Excellence model. Even better, train a handful of people outside IT and watch what sparks. And then tell us—what’s the first manual task you’d automate? Drop it in the comments, and subscribe if you want more tactical Power Platform playbooks.
Governance plus citizen developers equals scale—and that’s how you turn automation from backlog into a competitive advantage.
