Weeknote #1, RPA, UAT
I’ll be writing a weekly blog to share all things human+ and hopefully to provide some insights to help demystify RPA. For this week I’m trialling the 5-things that happened format as I feel I need that structure for now. Here goes….
One
Having already established our UK delivery team, I spent the first part of last week in Bulgaria with Questers one of our sister companies interviewing potential RPA developers. We met some really lovely people with a range of experience and it was quite refreshing to interview candidates who are very straightforward and honest. Sometimes when in an interview setting I think we feel compelled to shape our experience to the questions posed when in actual fact maybe sometimes it’s fine to say ‘no’. I’m pleased to say that we have identified and issued offers to our new candidates and I shall share more details in the coming weeks. The Questers team looked after us really well and even brought us to the Shoreditch of Sofia for some cocktails. I can’t say that I would recommend the Bulgarian brandy though……
Two
My colleague Mr. David Biden, CEO of human+ joined me for the interviews in Bulgaria. It was super to spend some time together, as we don’t often get that opportunity… While not interviewing, we spent some time refining our vision and goals for the practice. Thinking about what our organisational values are and how we would like to measure our success. I’ve been reading the book ‘Traction’ by Gino Wickman recently, and it’s really helped structure my thoughts and create a simple yet effective approach to communicate this to our team. If you haven’t read it I would really recommend it.
Three
We are working with a Higher Education Institute to run a Proof of Value(PoV+). During a PoV, we work with customers to identify suitable processes for the pilot and in parallel build up a business case for post PoV and engage senior stakeholders. Our initial workshops highlighted that there are significant efficiencies to be gained from automation, but what really pleased me is the care and attention management had in the process selection phase. I also think naming the Robot, Barbara Robinson was a really nice touch :-) The main driver here was to focus on processes that would help staff and to demonstrate how process automation could benefit their working day by removing mundane repetitive tasks. It is anticipated that the selected process could release staff to pick up more complex work. We ‘Signed Off’ our final process design on Friday and the build has just started. This client has really embraced automation and I can’t wait to see Babs the Robot in action.
Four
I spend most of my working life still focused on day to day delivery for one of our partners. I’m currently working with a large Council supporting them on their RPA journey. We just entered User Acceptance Testing ( UAT) on our first automation and a fairly critical point in the delivery cycle.
I think it would be fair to say that this stage of the project has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked. Mostly for reasons outside of our direct control… but that never sits well with me and I’m constantly looking at ways that we could have improved and provided a better customer experience. Once the current issues are resolved my plan is to run a retrospective to ensure we improve on our next round of UAT.
Five
We had our inaugural team meeting on Friday to introduce our new recruits, Grant Grobler and Oliver Cook to the rest of the human+ and Notbinary team.
As we are still fairly small, I’m keen that we spend some time creating structured processes and ‘ways of doing things’ ensuring we as a team provide a consistent service to our customers. Whilst we have a fairly good understanding of what this looks like, we’ve scheduled some time as a team, facilitated by Oliver to map this out.
Having said that I’m going to write a weekly blog, I’m on annual leave for the next couple of weeks, so see you on the other side!
