It’s always good to have a map when you embark on a journey. Below are my directions to the successful implementation of an Automation. These should help deploy bots quickly, without sacrificing the quality and with total cost of ownership in mind.
Right now these are placeholders, but with time each destination on this map will have it's own page.
Idea Stage – how to select automation candidates? What criteria should be used, what questions to ask, how to value the bot?
As-Is Business Process – capturing the current workflow
Define To-Be Process – creating the blueprint for your bot. When you want to build the house, you create a blueprint to map out where the kitchen is going to be and what’s a good place for bedrooms and bathrooms. Same here – you don’t want your bathroom to end up in the middle of the kitchen.
Development – the most exciting and creative part of this journey. Follow the best practices, version control your code, and complete pier reviews often.
Testing – this is a crucial step. Bugs in development cost the least amount of money. The cost goes up as you move up the environments, with the highest price being paid once the bot deploys to production.
Deployment – automate your deployment as much as possible.
Documentation – we all love creating documents, don’t we :-)? While it might not be the most exciting part of building bots, documentation is a key for a successful and scalable implementation.
Maintenance – the automation is deployed, now what? You need visibility into how well the bot is doing: is it running successfully and not just on paper (silent failures are the worst), does it reliably produce the output the business needs?
Customer Satisfaction – how do you know if customers are happy and the bot does what it’s supposed to do?