With the rise of Power Platform, more hobbyists and citizen developers 4 Hidden Costs of Using Power Platform to Build a Help Desk Ticketing Systemmay be tempted to try to build a ticketing system from scratch to save a few dollars upfront, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

There are 4 key hidden costs to building your own ticketing system that you must consider.

1. Cost of Development

Just because you are building a ticketing system yourself doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with a cost. How many hours will be spent learning, building, rebuilding, and training to create your own help desk? There is the opportunity cost (your time being taken away from other projects) as well as the literal cost of employee time to go through the whole development process. When you compare this to the cost of an out-of-the-box help desk, you may find it is actually more efficient to outsource this kind of build.

2. Testing

There are 6 key elements to testing a new application that most citizen developers neglect. Skipping over this important step to cut corners or “just get something up and running” can leave your organization vulnerable and cost you dearly in the long run.

  • Unit Testing – does each functionality in the application work as expected?
  • Usability Testing – is the UI intuitive? Is there a clear flow for the user? Does it meet accessibility standards?
  • Regression Testing – does adding a new feature break an existing one?
  • User Acceptance Testing – does the application meet the needs of the business as originally presented? Does it fulfill the requirements that spurred the development in the first place?
  • Performance Testing –does application performance degrade as usage increases? Does load-stressing the application show it will meet the demands of real-world usage?
  • Security Testing – does it handle sensitive data? Does it protect the data? Are there ways it could be hacked?

Now that you know what the 6 key elements to testing are, do you know how to carry them out?

3. Support & Enhancements

Who will support a home-grown ticketing system over the years? Will you regularly train staff to build, fix bugs, and implement enhancements? Will you have someone dedicated to keeping on top of best practices to ensure your ticketing system doesn’t pose any security risks?

4. Experience

Building an application like a ticketing system is much more involved and sophisticated than you may realize. If you are not an expert developer, the result may be less than professional. For experienced developers, you know from experience there are key features and conditions to include (and omit). When building a ticketing system from scratch in Power Platform without sufficient experience, it is very easy to miss key components that you will later wish you had known to include.

Conclusion

All in all, even for an advanced developer, you may find that Power Platform isn’t able to handle some of the features you really need for a good ticketing system. For less experienced developers, it can be a bit of a minefield navigating development, testing, and maintenance. Don’t leave your organization vulnerable while trying to cut corners.

If you want to take advantage of the benefits of having a ticketing system in M365 & Teams, we recommend NITRO Help Desk. It is the #1 IT help desk in the M365 environment and helps you still leverage the single sign-ons, Teams integration, and other benefits, while providing all the full-fledged ticketing system features like robust reporting, SLAs, omni-channel support, and more.

Learn more about NITRO Help Desk and what makes it the #1 help desk for M365 & Teams here.

Get your demo of NITRO Help Desk!