Automation: a dormant need
How to uncover dormant needs in terms of automation within your company and a 4-step process to implement it.
This article was originally published in our weekly publication — automationvalley.substack.com
In his recent book, Daniel Priestley suggests using people’s dormant needs in your sales strategy. Individuals and companies have dormant needs in various aspects of their lives. Addressing these needs can effectively alleviate their frustrations.
Anyone working in a middle in any company can identify these needs. If you’re a newbie in automation, starting with any frustration you find in your department or company is fine. On the other hand, if you consider making a process from this, you could follow some steps:
- Identify
- Evaluate
- Prioritisation
- Delivery
Let’s talk about what you should do in each of these steps.
1. Identify
It can be hard to convince your stakeholders to develop an automation project, but it’s free to identify their needs. You can do this by running a discovery project on your company (if you have their support) or simply talking to various colleagues and identifying their pain points.
There are many discovery frameworks out there. I prefer Jobs To Be Done (the book by Jim Kalbach is the most valuable for me). JTBD is a straightforward framework, defining situation, motivation, and outcome, which helps you identify the real need behind any problem.
The process from Innovation to Go-to-Market is described by Jim Kalbach in his Job To Be Done book.
For example; you might identify that your bookkeeper saves company invoices on a local drive to upload them into the accounting software every week. You can help them by creating automation that saves any files to this folder. Or you could define their Jobs To Be Done as: “When I receive an invoice in my email, I want to automatically transfer it to my accounting software so that I can ensure accurate and timely financial records without manual entry.”
2. Evaluate
The next step is to evaluate those needs. I’ve talked about the evaluation and estimation in this article. The main components of this evaluation should be hours optimized by the automation and the cost of development. You should also consider adding other parameters such as business impact, error risk,and cost of error.
Let’s say that you identify the following Jobs To Be Done and you need to evaluate them:
- When communicating with candidates, I want to have all communications centralized in one platform, so that I can avoid misleading communication and ensure consistency.
In this case, the evaluation would be:
- low business impact — mostly workload optimisation;
- medium/high risk of error — due to multiple communication channels with candidates: phone, email, LinkedIn Messages etc.;
- low cost of error — in the worst-case scenario you wouldn’t know that another colleague already sent an email to a candidate or something similar, so the cost for this error is minimal.
2. When a client submits a form, I want to automatically send offers within a few seconds, so that clients receive timely responses.
In this case, the evaluation would be:
- medium business impact — faster responses to requests = more sales;
- low risk of error — you could do a basic version of this automation with any email automation tool and it will work totally fine;
- medium/high cost of error — depending on how fast you discover the issue, you could miss some high-quality leads.
3. When invoicing clients, I want to automate the creation, sending, and tracking of invoices, so that I can ensure timely payments and reduce the administrative burden on my finance team.
In this case, the evaluation would be:
- low business impact — mostly workload optimisation
- medium or high risk of error — depending on the complexity of invoice creation and payment methods
- medium cost of error — any error in this process will affect your cash flow.
Feel free to use any framework you prefer or your own method. You can use my template build on this example from here — [Template] Dormant needs evaluation.
The previous examples completed in my template are available here: [Template] Dormant needs evaluation.
3. Prioritisation
As I mentioned in the First Steps in Automation article, you can use any prioritisation framework you prefer. You can find here my [Template] for Tools and process mapping and prioritisation.
However, some frameworks better suit these needs (such as Cost of Delay).
If you just want to experiment with automation, I would highly recommend you choose any Job To Be Done that has a low cost of error. Even if it has a low business impact. It’s important to gain some credibility and to win the team’s trust before convincing your stakeholders that it’s worth expanding the automation project to some critical tasks as well.
If the organisation is mature and you can invest some money in automation, I suggest prioritising the needs by business impact.
4. Deliver
As with any project, after prioritisation follows the development phase, which ends with the delivery.
One of the critical aspects of winning the stakeholders over is to end the delivery process with documentation and training. Some stakeholders might be reticent to automation. You will win their trust by creating some recorded demos with the process explained or by creating a wiki page with the process explained, tools used, and any exceptions or rules applied.
Keep in mind the importance of testing and process accommodation. It will take some time until everyone understands the new process and where the automation works; it takes time for everyone to adapt to the process or to resolve their requests.
Conclusion
Using these steps you will discover user dormant needs for automatisation. You will have a clear path from discovery to prioritisation and delivery.
By building the trust of your stakeholders by creating demos and wiki pages you will build a strong foundation for a business based on automatisations rather than manual procedures.
Keep in touch
For any further questions, I’m waiting for your email at cristian@filimon.tech with your automation challenges.
I’m happy to discuss and talk through them, to find the right solution. The only condition is to publish a case study in this newsletter about it (with all the data anonymized, of course).
See you soon,
Cristian
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