- A Boundless Community
- Inception: From Idea to Reality
- Evolution: Nurturing Growth and Engagement
- Innovation: Fostering Creativity and Collaboration
- Cheers to Five Years
A Boundless Community
Five years ago, I was lucky enough to work with some brilliant people to open the doors to the SS&C Blue Prism Community. With a vision of what we wanted to achieve, passionate support from the business, many late nights and early mornings, and just enough CSS and JavaScript knowledge to get by, we were able to launch the Community at Blue Prism World Orlando in 2019.
Since then, we've witnessed its transformation from a simple open space for questions to a dynamic hub of collaboration and innovation. As we celebrate five years of our Community, I wanted to reflect on our journey and particularly acknowledge the role played by our most important contributors — our Community members.
Inception: From Idea to Reality
I was brought into Blue Prism (now SS&C Blue Prism) at the start of 2019 to bring together a passionate but disparate customer community. While there were many questions on our support forum within the Blue Prism Portal and some additional content on the Digital Exchange forum, more conversations were taking place elsewhere — on tech and RPA forums and slack channels. We needed to bring those conversations together in one place where our experts and product teams could work with our end-users collaboratively to solve problems, suggest optimizations and align expectations and functionality.
The first focus was to bring together the various interested parties. We needed to have a strong support and knowledgeable approach without duplicating work that existed on our help and documentation sites. We needed to engage with our learning users on our soon-to-be-launched University and the developers on the DX, as well as accommodate the needs of people in specific industries and regions. We worked across the organization: myself in Marketing, Cari in our Customer Office, Melanie in the Partner team, our Center of Excellence (CoE), and colleagues in IT. Talking to people from around the business and end users, we were able to piece together what we thought people wanted.
We were hard-pressed for time and under instructions to launch as soon as possible. Unfortunately, not all the complicated system integrations were completed in time; most notably our new Community platform couldn’t sync user data with the Portal. Brilliantly, our CoE stepped in, and one of our product experts managed to hook up a digital worker (named Albert) to export and import the data across each time a user logged into the platform. This meant the manual data cleanup and upload that consumed a significant chunk of my workweek in the first month was quickly removed from my schedule!
Our CoE was also hugely helpful in setting up digital workers to support with moderation tasks (moving posts to the right place, highlighting areas that needed attention). This helped us stay on top of activity on the Community, reduced the amount of admin and was a much-needed extra pair of hands while I spent some time away from the business.
It’s funny because our journey began with a clear vision and ambitious goals for the Community – fueled by excitement about the platform’s potential and what we thought would be the initial main use case – small groups sharing knowledge and arranging events based on location or industry.
The global pandemic soon put a stop to any plans for in-person meet-ups. However, the wonderful people soon found greater happiness talking on masse about SS&C Blue Prism and optimizing their digital workforce. And that was OK. We wanted a space that would foster closer connections with our customers and facilitate these conversations.
Sixty-nine thousand posts later, I think we’ve succeeded!
Evolution: Nurturing Growth and Engagement
The key to any Community is its members, the people who use it. I’ve been blessed to work with some incredible people from SS&C Blue Prism and some have indelibly left their mark on this website and in the activities that we all take part in.
Alex and Xina were the initial promotors of the Community and were a pair of brilliant guiding voices.
Charlotte Kennett has been around since the start, too – from an advisory capacity in 2019 to a leadership role now.
Cari, Melanie, Norah and Lorena all played significant roles in shaping some of our key principles and ways of working – Ask Us Anything sessions, User Groups, 24 Hour Challenges – and I’m eternally grateful for their contributions.
And our current team, Kevin, Amy, Grace and Michael, and our Customer Experience colleagues Gabriella and Rita. What you see today — this amazing site, the PRP and ideation, all these brilliant blogs, and our support and Blueprint content – that's on these guys.
Of course, it’s the collaboration with our members to develop the platform and the opportunities we’ve been able to offer that is where we’ve created and maintained a real community, rather than hosted a forum. Member feedback has been vital as we’ve moved through several design updates, and when we’ve created or modified website features to allow our visitors to get the most out of it. This is why we have a separate Community Suggestions board, so we can constantly improve the site for the people who use it most.
While membership has grown and changed shape as people switched careers or moved companies, the personality of the community remains – warm, intelligent and inquisitive. There is so much knowledge on display but also so much compassion and helpfulness to other members. This is most often typified in the warm reactions we see to any member’s successes: MVP accolades, written Blueprints and Member of the Month blogs. There’s a real sense of belonging and friendship, and as a community manager, that’s just lovely to see (and it makes our jobs easier!)
Innovation: Fostering Creativity and Collaboration
Innovation lies at the heart of our community, driving us to push boundaries and explore new possibilities. And not just in terms of this website, but with implications across SS&C Blue Prism products.
Our Ideas section has been open since we launched the site five years ago. During that time, we’ve seen a huge amount of quality-of-life suggestions, product enhancements and intelligent innovations — all of which are peer-reviewed and fine-tuned, with many making it into final product releases.
Our Product Research Panel has its home on the Community too, we’ve seen some incredible use cases through the 24 Hour Challenge and Hackathon activities we’ve run. I truly believe through our shared passion for innovation, we've created a platform where ideas become reality and product innovation lives.
Cheers to Five Years
As we celebrate our 5th anniversary, on behalf of all of us at SS&C Blue Prism, I want to extend our heartfelt gratitude to each and every member of the SS&C Blue Prism Community. Your unwavering support and commitment are why we are here, and your enthusiasm and willingness to explore this world of intelligent automation continue to be the driving force behind our success.
As we look to the future, we remain committed to fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation. We hope you like the new look and feel, and we’ll continue to improve the functionality and connectivity of our website to support whatever it is you need to be successful.
Finally, we’d like to invite all members to raise a glass and salute five years of innovation and collaboration — and to many more years of boundless success together. Cheers!
