🎓Teach Michael: Automation Struggles

[Michael_S]

Hello there community,

In one of my current super secret community projects (private message me if you're curious!), we're discovering many of the things that pop up as challenges or blockers during the process of scoping, creating and delivering an automation. I find this fascinating because:

a) I love a good problem to solve and
b) Other people often have genius/creative approaches to solving problems that I could never dream of

And so, in this month's Teach Michael, I would like to ask you:

In the past year, what struggle / blocker / challenge have you most commonly faced in your career, and what tactics have you used to overcome it?

You might like to share:

• A story about a recent project which hit a roadblock, and what it took to get past that roadblock
• Your perspective on the emotional challenges that RPA faces - there's often fear of automations reducing the need for human work, how do you tackle that?
• Weird and wonderful examples of completely unexpected problems you've faced in your work

As always, your hints, tips and advice will be shared with our newest community members over in our "Community Tips for Beginner's" resource (which, by the way, is one of the most viewed posts in the community - so THANK YOU for helping me to build it!).

Over to you and your amazing brains!

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:blue_heart: Michael
(I'm part of the SS&C Blue Prism Community Team)
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[LeonardoSQueiroz]

Hi Michael,

With the advancement of the topic of artificial intelligence at the end of last year and the amount of information and topics being discussed, this was certainly a challenge to be absorbed, largely in the sense of being able to filter and organize studies, laboratories and even how to solidly apply this technology in everyday life since it was something new for me, every day a new framework emerged and the amount of information on the subject ended up being difficult to absorb everything at once, until the moment I started to organize myself more effectively , on the other hand it was really cool because to this day it's a hot topic and there was always some material available, be it AI + RPA integration, experiments, tests, evaluations, so it was also something positive after some time.

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Leonardo Soares
RPA Developer Tech Leader
Bridge Consulting
América/Brazil
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[EVIPUTI]

In the past year, my most common challenge was convincing the team about the benefits of automation. The fear of reducing jobs and the potential for costly mistakes, especially in a payment process like SAP, were significant blockers. To overcome this challenge, I employed several tactics:

1. Earn Trust: I began by earning the team's trust. I emphasized that automation wasn't about eliminating jobs but eliminating repetitive manual tasks that were prone to errors.

2. Demonstration: I conducted a demo of the last process we automated, showing how it could benefit the team by saving time and reducing errors. This initial demonstration helped to alleviate some concerns.

3. Proof of Concept: We created a POC specifically for SAP, focusing on creating payment drafts rather than fully automating payments. This allowed engineers to retain control and make the final decisions.

4. Data-Driven Approach: After 4-5 months, we gathered data to show that no payment had been processed incorrectly since the introduction of automation. This data-driven evidence was crucial in gaining the team's confidence.

5. Expanded Scope: As a result of successfully addressing their concerns and demonstrating the value of automation, we gained approval to fully automate the payment process. Moreover, the team recognized the power and benefits of automation, leading to the adoption of automation in approximately 17 additional processes.

This approach helped us overcome the initial resistance and fear surrounding automation, ultimately benefiting the team and the organization.

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Vipul Tiwari
Senior Process Simplification Developer
Amazon
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[Michael_S]

I hear this loud and clear. AI feels like one of those concepts that you either know intimately, or it feels like dark magic. Either way, specifically making the time to fully understand the technology and its capabilities has been so useful - gotta keep learning!

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:blue_heart: Michael
(I'm part of the SS&C Blue Prism Community Team)
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[Michael_S]

I love this so much @Vipul Tiwari. Trust is a hard, hard thing to build and accepting that it takes time is probably the hardest thing to accept. Being able to show clear results after 4-5 months is fantastic, I bet that conversation felt really good!

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:blue_heart: Michael
(I'm part of the SS&C Blue Prism Community Team)
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[harish.mogulluri]

Hi Michael,

In the past year or my whole automation journey  I noticed more challenging aspect is convincing  the business to onboard in the automation journey,

Its always important to try not to solve everything in one go instead try small chunks and make the business team confident  and add complexity on top of it

( though its based on the automation and how  much  current team is familiar with automation)

As Vipul highlighted  effective communication from  initial phase to all the way to the end of automation is important. and  more responsiveness in these phase with the business help  not only gain confidence to the current automation but also helps to get  lot of new RPA opportunities.

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If I answered your query. Please mark it as the "Best Answer"

Harish Mogulluri
Lead developer
America/New_York TX
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