When should I start automating my business processes?
Business process automation is essential to optimising and future-proofing your business. The obvious answer is that everyone should be automating and they should be doing it now. However, as custom software developers, we see a lot of mistakes being made. These are mainly due to a lack of understanding and preparation — even when current models and frameworks help us to do both at a rapid pace. So, here is a checklist to help you decide when to start your next business automation project in just 3–6 weeks.
1) When you have an idea. An automation idea is all about taking a manual or repetitive task and using technology to make it simpler or easier. These ideas are usually sourced in one of three ways: organically from a member of the team, based on feedback from staff, or part of an active consultation process to specifically root out inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Don’t just automate for the sake of it, because others are, or because you have seen a cool new product on the market. Just because the industry is doing it, your competitors are, or it is there in front of you absolutely doesn’t mean you and your business will benefit. This is by far the most common and costly mistake we see.
2) When you have explored if and how your idea will work. This is a 2 part task:
- Validate your idea. Validation is all about ensuring there is a need for your automation product — and there are a few steps to doing this: quick research into the current market; face-to-face problem identification interviews with your intended end-user; define the business logic and ROI (very helpful for product design and solution architecture); and finally, define what your automation is offering and to whom — mapping user needs to the value of the product.
- Prototype your idea. A 5-day Design Sprint will take your idea to a tested prototype within a single working week. Then you are ready to create a Minimum Viable Product. This involves reducing your product down to just the core functionality with a focus on what makes your product unique. The rule tends to be — the more tech-savvy your audience is, the simpler the MVP can be.
3) When you have audited your existing technical landscape. Look at what you already have, how everything connects, and how data is shared. For smaller companies, off-the-shelf and no-code/low-code options are attractive due to being cheap and fast. If it is software for just for a single team or workflow, and you do not need to own the data or connect to another process, these work just fine. For bigger companies with a lot more going on in IT, you will run into issues with integration and data ownership. So if you want to own your intellectual property, own your data, and be able to connect and audit systems, you will need to custom-build. Plus, if you build for integration from the start as we do, you can easily keep extending and scaling that ability as necessary in the future.
—
By the end of these three steps, you will have a validated idea that will sit comfortably within your existing technical landscape — everything you need to decide whether or not to start automating. And if you do it well, outlining a business case will take one week, the product design sprint will take only another week, and a technical feasibility check will be somewhere between 1–4 weeks.
Any questions about automating business processes or the individual steps above? We specialise in Validation Sprints, Product Design, and full Application Development — so leave a comment or send me a message.
