- The Novelty Effect Impact
- Turning Maintenance Into a Value Driver
- The Automation Maintenance Toolbox
- Stay Tuned
Maintenance might be among the most dreaded activities in any industry or community because it’s not shiny, new or even innovative. Nobody is ever thrilled by maintenance tasks (or chores), and we know it can be a struggle to dedicate resources to it.
But without maintenance, neither a car, a house nor your automation processes will stand the test of time.
“Castles made of sand, fall into the sea eventually.”
Jimmy Hendrix, Castles Made of Sand
In this blog series, we’re exploring the “art of maintenance” and sharing our best practices to help you get buy-in on maintenance and ensure your intelligent automation operations – all the great work you have done and the value you have generated – do in fact stand the test of time.
The Novelty Effect Impact
The world of intelligent automation has been a constantly changing, fast-paced industry since its creation; there's a lot of work people go through to try and keep on top of technological advances in the field. The demand from stakeholders is often to focus on the latest flavor of the month, which at the time of writing this is generative AI and all things ChatGPT.
Leadership teams put a lot of effort into keeping pace with those changes in the industry. If you’re lucky enough to have had some success with your automation program, you're probably in a situation where the demand for your team to build new processes is outstripping your resources. It can feel very challenging to balance new builds, research new capabilities and perform “keep the lights on” activities.
That’s something we see quite frequently in organizations – and something that needs to be addressed. If that’s also what you see happening in your organization, the responsibility is yours to ensure novelty doesn’t completely turn the focus away from the essentials, i.e., maintenance.
Turning Maintenance Into a Value Driver
To shift the common perception of maintenance activities, you need to present them as a value proposition – not the annoying, recurring chore on your task list.
Maintenance has a cost. Not maintaining your intelligent automation estate in operational conditions also has a cost, which happens to be much higher than the actual cost of maintenance.
The Cost of Avoiding Maintenance
When you don’t maintain your intelligent automation estate, just like if you don’t maintain your car or your house, you're eventually going to suffer a loss of function, and therefore a loss of value.
A platform that becomes inoperable isn’t working on not working efficiently or “breaks” every so often, will at best hinder, or at worst put a grinding halt to value creation (to keep things on a musical theme 😉).
Total Loss of Value = value created by automation + value created by the process owner
To make matters worse, disruptions from a lack of maintenance or poor maintenance create negative PR for the automation CoE(Center of Excellence) and the overall automation program. This can undermine the initial business case and ultimately lead to a loss of trust in automation as a capability.
The more that credibility erodes, the less opportunity you’ll be given to add value into your organization, as your automation capabilities are sidelined in favor of what are perceived to be more robust and stable alternatives.
The typical hurdles we see occur when trust in automation erodes are:
- Alternative solutions take preference over automation, even if they’re not technically the most suitable.
- A “hold” is placed on the pipeline or further investments until trust is restored.
More effort is required to convince stakeholders to invest in or support automation initiatives and address internal PR before they become the default corporate opinion.
Maintenance as a Value Proposition
As much as you want to protect the value delivered by existing automations, you need to balance that priority with maintaining a sound and stable foundation for automation.
The key to keeping a stable base and a solid foundation to work from is to shift mindsets and look at the right side of the mirror.
Maintenance needs to become synonymous with:
- Value protection: A stable platform creates value that can be sustained in the long run.
- Value creation: It enables the development of other value-creation activities.
- Credibility enhancement: It positions automation as a very reliable and efficient way to get things done.
The Automation Maintenance Toolbox
Technology
Keep an eye on technology announcements and roadmaps, both for the platform itself and its ecosystem, and be on the lookout for tools that can help you with maintenance. We host regular roadmap sessions for this and your customer success advisor (if not us 😊) can help you shed light on upcoming improvements that may help reinforce your maintenance toolbox.
Process and Governance
Maintenance is key – it’s a value-creation activity. As such, it must have its own roadmap or be prominent in your overall automation roadmap. There are two aspects to this:
A platform maintenance roadmap
This includes both the automation platform itself and the infrastructure around it. You need to collaborate with your IT and infrastructure teams; that’s not something you have full control over as an automation team, so you’re able to plan:
- Server maintenance
- Upgrades
- Migrations
Example scenario
You’re running an SS&C Blue Prism v6 deployment, and you’re considering a migration to v7 to access all of the new features, including our SS&C Blue Prism 7.3.
However, if you’re still running your virtual machines, which are still running Windows 7, you’ll face a compatibility issue. This illustrates the need to plan maintenance activities in collaboration with other teams that provide the infrastructure for the platform.
It’s also about ensuring you’ve got a budget assigned to maintenance, to keep your automation activities running. That’s something you can do using the value proposition we introduced earlier in this blog.
No budget = No maintenance
No maintenance = No value
No value = No budget
Turn it around and you’ve introduced a virtuous circle of maintenance.
An automation maintenance roadmap
Depending on the size of your deployment, this might sound like a daunting roadmap – unless you cadence your process review.
Process review is to seek the use of other features to expand the scope of a process (that’s a good thing) and also verify that your automation does what it should and is taking the opportunity to do it efficiently. Just because something’s working, doesn’t mean that it’s working efficiently.
Example scenario
As you upgrade your platform, you may leverage the backwards compatibility that we offer between certain versions.
Backwards compatibility has a “darker” aspect to it. Just because a process has been successfully migrated from one version to another doesn't mean it is fully optimized for the current version of SS&C Blue Prism, as our versions operate differently. Newer versions also provide improved methods for accomplishing certain tasks.
In such a scenario, you may have an opportunity to:
- Improve the reliability
- Reduce exception rates
- Increase processing speed
The cadenced process review (embedded into each sprint and your budget) is going to help you reduce the further need for maintenance and create more efficiencies within the organization. It will also make the task more manageable and interesting for everyone involved.
Keeping an older, functional platform unchanged may seem like maintaining stability, but it also means accumulating technical debt. Upgrading without reviewing processes also adds to this debt. A process that has been carried over from version to version without regular reviews is likely to break. It may not happen immediately, but it will happen at some point, bringing potential negative consequences.
You have everything to win by investing time into a cadenced process review or recertification regularly.
Maintenance Mindset
None of the principles we discussed and introduced in this blog would work without ensuring all automation stakeholders develop what we call “the maintenance mindset”, with three principles to live by:
Just because it works and delivers value today, doesn’t mean it will continue to do so
Being proactive, working in the spirit of continuous improvement and thinking medium- to long-term are key parts of that mindset that you need to adopt as an automation CoE.
It’s not because an automation works that it’s efficient
There are many reasons why automation could have been efficient once upon a time, but might not be anymore.
When you first began with intelligent automation, your processes were likely built by junior developers or teams who were working with the knowledge, experience and tools available to them at that time. Odds are, these processes could now be simplified using new features that would improve their resilience.
We can’t recommend enough to review these processes and make sure they’re optimized for the version of the platform that they’re currently running on. Even if they still work because you don’t want to fall into the trap of backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility is great, but relying on it too much puts the sustainability and resilience of your automations at risk 😊.
It's not only about the automation platform, but about infrastructure, target applications and automations
Things don’t end when you deploy an automation. All of this is a virtuous circle, and everything can always be improved and made more resilient or more efficient. The longer you wait between such cycles, the harder it gets.
Stay Tuned
We’ll share our best tips and tricks on the “art of maintaining” your automation platform and your automated process in our next two blogs.
Stay tuned!
