🎓Teach Michael: Supporting Tools for Automation Projects

[Michael_S]

Ready for another round of beginner tip sharing, community? I find these threads so ridiculously useful, and it's all down to how generous you all are with your hints, tips, experience and advice. Thank you!

This week, I'm playing around with the free trial of Blue Prism Document Automation and, whilst processing tax forms (yay!), I got to thinking about the other supporting tools you all must be using to make the process of identifying, designing, processing and caring for your automation projects easier / faster / smarter.

And so, this week in Teach Michael...

What non-automation tools do you keep handy that make the process of creating automations smarter?

You might like to share:

:keycap_1:Any AI tools you're using that help you with things like code customisations or documentation
:keycap_2:Analytics or measurement tools that help you understand the impact of your work
:keycap_3:Neat browser extensions or other small software that add quality of life improvements to your main tools

...or anything else you think a beginner in our field might find useful!

And if you're interested in more tips from our community on Getting Started as an intelligent automation professional, check out our past discussions below:

• What not to automate
• How and when to involve senior leadership in an automation program
• How to find processes suitable for automation
• Advice on creating your first automation

Over to you, community - I can't wait to hear your tips!

Michael 

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

Looks like we're struggling for ideas on this one, so I went ahead and asked some of our internal folks at SS&C Blue Prism for ideas! They've suggested:

A Regex Editor:
"Tools like https://regexr.com/ make building regular expressions (which can be pretty confusing) really easy. Couldn't live without it!"

Project Management Tools:
"We live on Asana, but any project management tool that allows you to track and assign tasks within a project is a must"

Sharpening skills:
"I love rpachallenge.com as a way to kick off a team meeting. We didn't necessarily complete the challenges, but we'd spend a few minutes debating approaches just to keep our minds sharp."

Over to you, community. What are the tools you couldn't live without?

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

Daily driver list:

• Notepad++
• OneNote
• Grammarly
  
• ChatGPT
  
• ActivePresenter
• Postman
  
• BluePrism
• WordTune

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If I was of assistance, please vote for it to be the "Best Answer".

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejaskumardarji/

Thanks & Regards,
Tejaskumar Darji
Sr. Consultant-Technical Lead
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[Michael_S]

Oh @Tejaskumar_Darji I completely forgot about Grammarly! Love that extension, it's so useful for good writing. Notepad++ is useful for anything code too. Thanks for the input!

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

Grammarly must support inside Blue prism for spell check :-P.

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Amlan Sahoo
Senior RPA Consultant
WonderBotz
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[LesleyCase]

Regex101.com for building & testing regular expressions.

Azure DevOps Boards for our pipeline management / project management. Love the customisability of the application and dashboard creation.

Power BI Reports for displaying our RPA ROI Reporting (alongside an automation I built to pull the data from Blue Prism into the reports).

W3Schools Online Web Tutorials for learning new bits of code to play with alongside JSFiddle - Code Playground

GitHub for code sharing with other NHS Trusts

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Lesley Case
RPA Developer
Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust
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[Michael_S]

Brilliant inclusions @LesleyCase - thank you! Mind if I add them to the Beginner's Tips megathread?

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

More than happy for you to include them, @Michael Shillingford :)

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Lesley Case
RPA Developer
Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust
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[EVIPUTI]

Microsoft Excel- Great for managing data and lists related to your automations. Useful for mapping processes, tracking results, recording inputs/outputs, etc.

JIRA\Assana - Issue tracking software that can help you manage automation tasks, bugs and enhancements. Makes collaboration with coworkers easier.

SQL programs like MySQL\Dynamo DB Workbench - Helpful for querying and manipulating data within your automations.

Diagramming tools like Visio, Drawio or Lucidchart - Visually representing processes and automation workflows. H

Editors like Notepad++ - Simple but powerful for editing code, configuration files and other automation-related text.

Version control software Git - Essential for tracking changes to my automation code/files over time and allowing multiple contributors.

Project management tools like Microsoft Project\Confluence or Asana--> Help me plan, organize and manage the many tasks involved.

Cloud env AWS for deployment and other benefits.Power BI/Tableau -- Reporting view for leadership

Postman/Soap UI - API calls and testing.

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Vipul Tiwari
Senior Process Simplification Developer
Amazon
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