An operationalized automation program can help you achieve your strategic goals more quickly, make better decisions and provide better customer service. But as your automation program matures, it can be hard to keep track of all the different parts \u2014 and make sure everything stays aligned with your overall strategy.<\/p>\n
That’s why it’s important to have a plan in place that helps you scale your automation program effectively. Like an overgrown yard full of unruly grass, weeds, trees and shrubbery, an automation program lacking a well-developed plan will quickly overwhelm an organization. If you’re looking for guidance on how to strategically scale your lawncare efforts, we will \u201cleaf\u201d that to you. But if your concern is enterprise automation<\/a>, we’ve got you covered. Below are some things to consider when scaling your automation program.<\/p>\n In the operationalized stage we focused heavily on showing the benefits of a center of excellence<\/a> (COE) and recommended standing up a COE as the driver for change within your organization. The scaled stage is all about taking the COE to the organization. The COE will help you drive your automation program forward by providing:<\/strong><\/p>\n Importantly, at this point, you should have alignment from leadership and buy-in at multiple levels of the organization. The COE needs to communicate to these organizational levels, and the teams not directly involved should know when to reach out and how to communicate with the COE.<\/p>\n With automation more embedded in your organization, you may now have enough volume to merit dedicated roles and responsibilities aligned to automation needs. Individuals working together on both technical and business aspects of automation should be a part of the leadership team of the COE. This is important because they provide a natural balance between the business’s desires and the possibilities the technology team brings.<\/p>\n With so many automations and tools running, there may also be a need to add dedicated support resources on any pre-existing IT departments to meet the needs that power users cannot solve. This could take the shape of an automation team member dedicating more of their time to pure support or training help desk users on the basics of the automation programs in the organization.<\/p>\n This is an excellent stage to start building a citizen development program<\/a>. Citizen developers are non-technical employees who see opportunities for using technology to make their work easier and more efficient. These people might be power users or even subject matter experts (SMEs). Regarding enterprise automation, we highly recommend partnering citizen developers with proven developers who can assist with troubleshooting and providing insight.<\/strong><\/p>\n Your organization\u2019s intake, pipeline and prioritization processes should already be fairly mature before sharing with the rest of the organization. Firstly, the intake form should be self-service, and a business analyst, or preferably the SME, can fill it out. This ensures a certain level of quality and helps drive ownership of the submitted items through to completion.<\/strong><\/p>\n The pipeline backlog should have clear rules you\u2019ve defined and aligned to your organization\u2019s needs and goals. These rules should include ROI policies for new automations, and the COE should review these policies regularly. Prioritization should follow a similar ruleset but identify what teams should work on next based on strategic impact.<\/p>\n For example, prioritization models could include putting a higher impact on areas in dire need of automation or deprioritizing short-term teams or teams with less technological capabilities.<\/p>\n When scaling your automation program, deployments will greatly increase, which means many more go lives, testing requirements managing the software development lifecycle<\/a> (SDLC) across departments and keeping service level agreements (SLAs). Many automation programs offer ways to accelerate your delivery and deployment. Your internal automation teams shouldn\u2019t shoulder the burden of support alone. Your larger technical organization needs to help.<\/strong><\/p>\n With multiple environments set up during scaling, you must also identify ways to automatically test large amounts of data with the latest iterations. We recommend regular refreshes of QA environments to match production data, so you keep unknowns away from areas that could affect customers. You should also use automation tools that apply library components regularly. The COE and analysts designing automations should recognize areas where workflows and automations are reusable and build those into a component library. Fully unit testing each library component will help speed up the testing requirements<\/a>.<\/p>\n Establishing realistic SLAs for the support teams mentioned above builds confidence in the automations, further expanding the automation program\u2019s success. These successes can allow you to further integrate automations into disparate systems and teams. When you gain a controlled flow of information, integration and development, you can build on a federated architecture where components can act independently or as part of the larger end-to-end business processes.<\/p>\n At this point in your enterprise automation maturity, there are already multiple vendors, platforms, or products in your pipeline. Maturely using all these technologies can take your automation from the level of hand-raking piles of leaves to mulching, composting and using them in your garden. Just like moving from merely raking and bagging to composting creates new life from old leaves, scaling your automation program creates new opportunities for inefficient, underperforming business processes.<\/p>\n Today, most companies leave robotic process automation (RPA) bots in production unattended, meaning humans have little or no interaction with the bot outside of exception handling.<\/strong> However, there are many use cases for attended bots driving small efficiencies for each record but at extremely large volumes. Some quick examples of efficiencies driven by attended bots include formatting spreadsheets, transcribing contact center scripts, compiling documents or downloading large amounts of files.<\/p>\n![\"Automation](\"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/blog_BPM-RPA-Maturity-Stages_1-4_12222022-1024x685.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOrganization<\/h2>\n
Driving Vision, Strategy and Alignment with a Center of Excellence<\/h3>\n
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Education and Training Automation Talent<\/h3>\n
Operations<\/h2>\n
Automation Program Intake and Prioritization<\/h3>\n
Automation Program Delivery and Support<\/h3>\n
Enablement<\/h2>\n
Technology Enablement<\/h3>\n