First steps in automation

A step-by-step guide to start your first automation. To start is always the hardest part, and a good start can give a great feeling in the following steps, even when things might go wrong.

This article was originally published in our weekly publication — automationvalley.substack.com

In this article, I will cover the first steps you must take to automate part of your business, your workflow, or even your life.

Planification

Planning is always the hardest part, at least for me. When you’ve been in business (especially in startups) for more than a year, you’ve made many recurring processes. You often struggle with them week by week and month by month.

The easiest part of that is to map three main components: tools, people involved in the process, and the process itself.

1. Mapping

This is the hardest part. It’s especially true when your company has developed somewhat hectically. It’s had a lot of small decisions about tools and processes made day by day without the big picture in mind.

Example of existing tools in a company, centralized by department and processes.

What I recommend is to add a new line for each process, not for each tool. For example, I’m working with a client that uses ClickUp for various purposes as a task management solution, OKR management, video-production management, and sales leads. I would add a new line with ClickUp for each of those processes.

Split the processes like that, as much as makes sense. It will allow you to make some decisions. For example, you could integrate/automate only some processes from a platform. Or, you could change from one platform to another. (For the same client, we’re currently considering moving the leads part from ClickUp to Brevo, the email solution that we’re currently using).

2. Tools and process analysis

The next step is to analyze each tool. In that phase, as the automation specialist, you can discover the many uses of the same tool. It’s very hard to have a clear overview of tools used in accounting, for example; so you can have some biases about the processes used for that tool.

Each time you discover a secondary use of a tool, add a new line with the new usage.

Afterwards, take some time to look at their APIs. Don’t be scared! 🙀 You don’t need to be a developer for that, just check some main things.

• API Availability: Is the API available in my current billing plan? (A lot of tools offer the API functionality only for paid billing plans)
• Authentication method: Is the authentication method accessible to me? 90% will use basic authentication methods: Bearer Token and API Key. But, a few need some dedicated IPs or VPNs, such as an FTP connection. This could become hard very easily.
• Endpoint / Method / Parameters: This is where, how, and what you request from an API.
• The endpoint could be “Task lists” for example, for ClickUp, so the app allows you to interact with the task lists. Don’t skip this step, not all the products offer endpoints for each activity, for example, for the billing part it is not so common to have an endpoint.
• The method allows you to interact with that endpoint; you can add something to a database, update, delete or just query. Again, don’t skip this step; for example, the delete function is not common for any API.
• Parameters allow you to filter the request. For example, you can filter the invoices from specific dates when you make the request. Without that, you would extract all the invoices and filter them later, which could be expensive for various tools.
• The response is how the API replies, which is an important step because it is used for further steps. You will usually have some standard errors, an important part if you need to handle complex integration.

Tools analysis, with processes and the technical analysis of their API

If you want to dive deeply into API structure, take a look at the Postman explanation.

How to analyse those tools

I prefer to do that analysis using two tools: Postman and Make/Zapier. Most tools give a Postman library with it; you can easily test everything with your API key. Tools like Make.com or Zapier will help with API integration. It’s a no-code solution. The easiest way to use them is with their connectors.

Be careful. If you see tools’ names as connectors, that doesn’t mean you can connect everything with them. Most connectors are built for the main features of the APIs. So, check your specific needs. For example, check if they can connect with the Task list endpoint. Otherwise, you’ll use the API to connect it, and that becomes a bit more difficult than using connectors.

Product features, API endpoints, and no-code connectors.

My advice is to keep every idea as a backlog artefact in the SCRUM methodology. Add notes after each analysis. Each tool and integration is unique. You’ll forget what you analyzed first.

3. Estimation, Estimation, Estimation

You must estimate three things:

• Optimized hours — Estimate optimized hours roughly, as precise calculations are often difficult. For example, 15 users x 15 minutes x 20 days equals 75 hours monthly..
• It’s important to make that estimation because there are some solutions used by the entire company, and with only 15 minutes optimized per day you can gain a lot of hours monthly.
• Development cost — again is hard to estimate precisely. You can think in terms of days: 0.5 for simple scenarios, 1 for medium ones, and 2 for difficult ones. I. If you don’t have the internal capabilities to do it, take a rough estimation from an agency or a developer, which will help you to decide on the next step.
• Business impact — the most important step, you should constantly ask yourself or your stakeholders: what’s the impact of having this in alignment with business goals?

Again, be honest with yourself or challenge your stakeholders. Every manager will try to overestimate their department’s impact. For example, automating offers would help almost any business. It would help more than automating contract generation.

4. Prioritisation

Feel free to use any prioritization framework for this step; if you already have one, use it. If not, take a look at RICE, Value vs Effort, and MoSCoW; these work great in this situation. Also, you can take into consideration the Cost of Delay framework; it’s very relevant for automation in a simplified version.

Template for Prioritisation frameworks

You can download my template for mapping and prioritization from here.

Conclusion

Like anything else, the first step is to have a strong plan. This is especially important if you or your company lack experience in automation.

If you have no experience or want some small wins, start with minor tasks. They may not be at the top of your list.

Each company should have time to map its processes. They should see how automation will improve them. They should also learn new processes.

Keep in touch

For any further questions, I’m waiting for your email at cristian@filimon.tech with your automation challenges (not tasks).

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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