Weeknote #2, RPA, UAT, Agile
After being out of the office for a couple of weeks on a holiday of sorts. I’ve come back to work refreshed and hit the ground running with a pretty busy week ahead. I’ve spent some of my week out and about meeting with some of our customers which is always a highlight for me. We are privileged to be working with some really great clients, who are truly focused on putting the needs of humans ( staff & customers) at the heart of their automation projects. Here’s a short synopsis of my week….
One
Having labored over the establishment of our core UK delivery team, it was great to come back from holidays knowing that everything was in safe hands. In a very short period of time, we have managed to build a robust team of like minded individuals, all focused on achieving the best outcomes for our customers. Thanks Team :-)
Two
Barbara the Robot , named by one of our client’s — giving her a persona and truly integrating her into the team, has been doing splendid work whilst I’ve been away. We have successfully built our Proof Of Value ( PoV) process and UAT is underway — and a reminder of how important UAT is to any project. It’s a pretty laborious and dull part but it’s the time to spot and correct any errors before go live. I think it’s fair to say that Barbara is doing a pretty good job, with an overall process improvement time of 88%. The main driver in selecting this particular process was twofold; to create some resilience within the service to be able to deal with peaks and troughs in demand; and to remove a cumbersome process from manual processing to highlight the benefits that RPA and to show how the human workers can benefit from this technology.
Three
Myself and the team made a whistle stop trip to Wales to spend some time with one of our customers. The purpose of the session was to capture the detailed steps of the process we are building for our initial PoV. During our brief visit, we also got to spend some time with some of the senior management team, to educate them on the benefits RPA can bring to their organisation. I really enjoy these sessions, particularly when we do a quick demo and you can almost visibly see people have those light bulb moments.
One of the main drivers for embarking on an automation program for this customer, is to create a more resilient service so they can effectively deal with their ever increasing customer demand. But more importantly, they want to remove mundane repetitive tasks, enabling staff to have more direct contact with customers.
Four
I spend a large proportion of my time out on client delivery for one of our key partners. We ran a retrospective last week to review the delivery of our first process and what struck me is that if we had ‘shorter’ feedback loops, a number of the obstacles we encountered could have been avoided. This has got me to start thinking about the role that ‘Agile’ can play in the delivery of process automation and the opportunity we have to improve the delivery cycle through the adoption of agile principles and ceremonies. Following our retrospective we have agreed to start running show and tells, so we can demonstrate what we are building sooner rather than the business only seeing the finished product during UAT. We are starting small, but I’m confident that small incremental changes like this will lead to big benefits.
