Establishing Your Company's Vision

[CharlesTiu]

A Vision
In my view, the vision is one of the most talked about yet most misunderstood and underrated element that can make or break your RPA capability.

Having a good vision is critical to your internal and external stakeholders because it doesn’t just tell people where you aspire to be, it helps drive a lot of the decisions to help you actually get there. It shapes the overall culture, it compels people to choose one decision over another, it forces us to think of all the things needed in the bigger picture to make and sustain this vision, and it can be the reason why people wake up excited in the morning to pour their heart into something they vehemently believe in.

If you don’t have a vision, all of the above falls apart. So how do you come to a good vision that can drive good results? Let’s start with what a vision isn’t.

Those are metrics, those are KPIs. Those are important, but they’re not the vision. The vision of those things above are written down here below:

The difference here is that the vision points to a larger idea of what’s going to happen. Don’t’ get me wrong, the KPI is also critical. It helps push you forward in achieving your vision, after all, a vision without a plan is just a dream. But the vision also plays a role in making sure you have what it takes to sustain the vision’s momentum after achieving the KPI. What do I mean? Let’s use our Vision #1 above as an example - Achieving digital transformation where RPA / technology has become an integral part of enabling.

To sustain this vision, one could look at things from different lenses.

Example 1 - Upper management support

 One particular international bank with the above vision pushes each business unit with a KPI to reduce operating costs. Each business unit can utilize different technologies provided by other CoEs, which could be Chatbots, Machine Learning, Big Data + Data Analytics, etc.

The company encourages everyone to try out and invest in new tech to cut costs, it forces departments to set aside a budget for technology, and it fosters a collaborative relationship between Business and Tech Teams to grow together and enable the business. The RPA team has a lot of potential in here to grow, both because its main purpose is to help reduce cost through process streamlining / automation, but also because it has clearly predictable savings.

Example 2 – Driving culture change/ adoption through training

Because the head of Operations loves the idea of RPA and the value it can bring, they’ve now mandated that all the teams within a business unit must have at least one person trained on this technology. We organized days of classroom sized training, we trained their partner, we enabled everyone we could, we left them with a list of available online materials, and directed everybody to our online communities to foster future collaboration and growth together.

The adoption of RPA starts here, the acceptance of it rather than fear of it starts here, and it helps foster the future culture that drives the mindset of automation first.

What's the takeaway?

With a compelling and clear vision, it drives a lot of things to happen. It drives the KPI that the CoE must achieve, it shapes the targets that businesses must achieve, it encourages businesses and COEs to work together and grow together, it compels people to attend training to get new skills that can foster a mindset change and ultimately a culture change.

If the vision is done right, it encourages people to welcome technology rather than fear it, it forces people to think of the larger picture on how technology can help them, and it helps unleash the potential in people to achieve more by doing the things they’re truly passionate about doing.

 Originally posted here on linkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rom-series-part-1-setting-clear-vision-charles-tiu/