Human-Centered Office Automation
Adding simple software skills to financial expert’s portfolio
Backgrounds
Jane Woods was in charge of creating and collecting Information Technology (IT) bills at a company of ~200,000 employees. She wanted to find a way to create a large number of bills due to the sharp increase in her company’s cloud service usage. I would like to share my experience with Jane’s team to automate workflows by enhancing her own team’s software skills.
User-Centered Design: How We Start
Before automating her office, we studied the user’s pain points to improve their services. Users often couldn’t find their budget, spending, and service items. That hindered them from paying their bills on time. Thereby, within a month, we along with her team launched a new web service to show the IT account balance by service item. In retrospect, it was a bit of a gamble to expose bottlenecks by adding an extra workload to her team.
High-Impact Tasks
There was no common data source for her team before automation. Each team members retrieved data from numerous sources and created her/his own manual workflows. These personal workflows prevented them from exchanging data between team members without extra clarifications and data operations. Thus, the bills (products)that came out of those workflows were not always coherent.
To resolve these issues, we first implemented common data names and consolidated data files in multiple computers into one database. That database became the starting point for all of the workflows. In the process of consolidating data, inconsistency in the data produced by multiple teams was documented in detail. That documentation was later used by Jane to initiate conversations for facilitating the team-level data exchange via APIs.
We started workflow automation by identifying major bottlenecks. We ranked workflows by their usage to automate them one by one. For this workflow conversion, we chose the technologies most familiar to her team. The processes using email were not incorporated into new workflows to save employees time on their email.
People, People, and People
Successful automation should make people more valuable to organizations. At the very beginning of the project, Jane asked us if we could teach new software skills and agile practices for automation to her team. With the support from our leadership, we decided to work with them in pairs throughout our engagement. Because they were financial-domain experts, we could implement correct logic for new automated workflows fast. For new team members, we wrote comprehensive documentation about the new workflows. Team members shared code at repositories to facilitate their collaboration. The collaborative work environment was a byproduct of our effort for automation.
Let Domain Experts Solve Problems!
Pinpointing the actual causes of the efficiency deterioration is the most crucial step to improve organizational efficiency. For this engagement, we provided domain experts opportunities to learn software skills to automate their office, so they can fix the fundamental efficiency issues by/for themselves. Once they became familiar with new skills, all I had to do was get out of their way. It has been a few weeks since this engagement ended, and I see her team continuing to remove bottlenecks fast.
*I would like to thank Malcolm Scott (malcscott91@icloud.com) for reviewing this article.
*Jane Woods is a pseudonym.
