The story behind the creation of our dedicated automation team
Welcome to the Jungle (WTTJ) is an online platform that allows companies to post job offers, showcase their corporate culture through multimedia content, and streamline job searches for candidates by showcasing the human side of companies.
My name is Clément Folliet, and I am the Business Technology Manager at WTTJ (and a former Developer and Engineering Manager). As part of my role, I am responsible for building a team dedicated to automations and internal tools.
Automation involves creating automated workflows that connect different applications and services to perform specific actions in response to predefined triggers to simplify processes and eliminate the need for repetitive manual tasks. The goal is to save time, eliminate human errors, improve process efficiency, and enable users to connect heterogeneous applications.
In this article, I’m going to share the fascinating story of how we created our dedicated automation team at WTTJ in 2023. I will explore the missions assigned to this team, its composition, its mode of operation, the successes and failures encountered during its first year of existence, and the expected development prospects for the year 2024.
You will discover how a small team of automation engineers helped three of our internal teams to avoid having to spend dozens of hours on laborious tasks each month, working with significantly less disruption thanks to nearly 150 automations.
[January 2023] A struggling team with limited technical expertise
At the beginning of 2023, a new team dedicated to customer onboarding had recently been formed. Comprising about 10 members, it was immediately tasked with the challenging mission of onboarding hundreds of customers each month onto our product. This complex and time-consuming process required collaboration from several internal and external teams within the company, as well as the sharing of data across 15 tools.
Faced with this challenge, the team quickly sought inspiration by consulting other business teams using automation tools such as Zapier. The goal was to automate repetitive tasks such as data synchronization between two tools, creating reminders, or sending automated emails.
However, the team soon realized that they neither had the time, given their workload, nor the necessary skills to build an effective automated system. The few automations in place did not always function correctly, resulted in errors, and did not instill sufficient confidence. At times, the team preferred to perform certain tasks manually rather than rely on automations.
In light of this, and convinced that proper tooling could enable our teams to work more efficiently and under optimal conditions, the company decided to create a dedicated team for the automation of internal processes.
[May 2023] Creation of the automation team: Its vision and ambitions
A team consisting of two automation engineers and one manager was formed. We deliberately chose members with in-depth technical expertise, extending beyond the “no-code” domain and benefiting from a strong background in software engineering. Recruiting profiles inclined towards no-code posed a significant challenge, as developers transitioning to this approach are rare. On the other hand, there is an abundance of candidates who can quickly undergo training on a no-code tool, but unfortunately many lack a deep understanding of the underlying technical concepts or the experience needed to ensure the longevity of a technical solution well beyond its production deployment.
We are convinced that creating a scalable automated system requires skills and knowledge beyond mere task automation. We frequently encounter error management issues, handle significant volumes of data, and must adhere to security best practices to prevent exposure to malicious activities.
Beyond the technical aspect, our goal was to build a team of curious individuals capable of engaging with business experts, understanding their challenges, and describing technical possibilities to them. We believe that the best solutions emerge when technical and functional experts collaborate and challenge each other.
Our ambition was to establish a center of expertise aimed at increasing efficiency and improving the working experience of business teams. This center is tasked with advising and overseeing teams in the selection of tools and implementation of automations, with the goal of optimizing existing processes, reducing repetitive tasks, and providing quality technical support. It thus contributes to enhancing team efficiency and creating the best possible working experience.
We decided to rely on “business ambassadors” with whom we exchange information on a weekly basis to establish a link between our technical team and the “internal client” business teams. These ambassadors play a crucial role in understanding business challenges, identifying and prioritizing specific needs, and determining edge cases and exceptional procedures that could compromise automations. Their expertise allows us to tailor solutions to the unique requirements of each business team.
[August 2023] Process implementation and initial projects
During the implementation of our initial projects, we had to select our technology stack and define our initial processes.
Optimizing consistency and quality
We chose to use Make to host our new automations because this platform allows us to create complex automations with advanced features to effectively manage them. These features include branch creation, manipulation and processing of data tables, error management, cost control, security, and maintenance.
We retained Zapier as a historical player in the company to preserve all existing automations and allow anyone in the company to conduct automation tests if desired.
It soon became essential to standardize our approach to automation construction to ensure high consistency and maintainability of systems, regardless of the automation author or end user. This standardization was achieved through naming conventions, documentation templates, and the application of best practices. For example, we standardized the names of automations and the way to document their triggers and API calls. Another example was the creation of “user” service accounts to build connectors to third-party tools, thus avoiding dependence on the accounts of employees who might leave the company, disrupting automations when their accounts are closed.
Enhancing efficiency and management
With the creation of our dedicated automation team and the success of the initial projects, numerous requests have poured in for the implementation of new projects or the maintenance of existing ones.
Therefore, we have implemented two new processes to enable teams to submit new automation requests and report issues.
The first process has allowed us to standardize requests, ensuring that we gather the right information to prioritize and handle them effectively.
We now ask each team wishing to automate a process to document the project context and its point of contact, explain the existing process and the issues they’ve encountered with it, and describe their expectations and anticipated impacts (in terms of time, cost, and customer or user experience). This allows us to quickly determine which internal expert is best suited to address the request and prioritize based on benefits to the company. Documenting a request often helps to gain perspective, identify the root cause of problems more easily, and consider more impactful solutions than simple fixes to processes requiring an update.
Upon receiving an automation request, our team will meet with the project’s business owner to delve into different use cases, describe the solution in more detail, and estimate risks and technical feasibility.
The phases of automation construction by automation engineers will follow, with tests conducted with the business expert to validate the system’s proper functioning in accordance with the expectations expressed in the initial specification stages.
Once the automation is deployed in production, our team will handle documentation and technical maintenance, while the business expert will be responsible for functional documentation and change management with users.
The second bug reporting process aims to ensure that problems are reported with sufficient detail for investigation. Unlike previous practices based on exchanges through Slack messages, emails, or coffee machine discussions, the use of a technical support tool like Jira allows us to centralize and share information and progress status with multiple people, prioritize issues based on their urgency and severity, and track the team’s workload.
[November 2023] Tool consolidation and scaling
Getting rid of bugs
It quickly became evident that our “functional’ scope was significantly expanding while the size of the team responsible for automations remained unchanged. We needed to ensure the scalability of our operations.
Over time, with the rapid growth in the number of our automations, we faced an increase in errors. To address this promptly, we implemented several systems. Firstly, an alert system with a small automation created in Make was set up, notifying our team via Slack whenever an automation stopped due to an error, and thus ensuring optimal responsiveness to issues.
Simultaneously, a dashboard in Datadog was created to track the evolution of these errors over time. This allows us to analyze the least stable automations and the most common types of errors, facilitating the planning of improvements to avoid the recurrence of these errors in the future.
A dashboard tracking the number of executions for each automation also helped us identify those that were running too frequently, taking up a significant portion of our platform budget. The identified costly automations were improved, for example, by modifying their structure or adjusting their frequency and time range of execution, such as reducing the execution interval from 5 to 10 minutes and suspending automation at night and on weekends. Additionally, this dashboard also helped to detect malfunctioning automations requiring corrections or simply identifying those that were not being used and could be removed.
We were frustrated by the difficulty of debugging certain automations because it was not always easy to determine if data in a tool was being used in an automation. It was also impossible to easily know if modifying the configuration of a tool would have an impact on automation. For example, would a change or deletion of a field in a Monday board have an impact on automation? To address this issue, we implemented a full-text search engine that allows us to more easily identify keywords present in automations and thus the dependencies between tools and the automations themselves. More specifically, this operation is technically translated into an automation that collects all the blueprints of Make scenarios. These are then slightly restructured using a Node.js script before being indexed in Algolia. It is then sufficient to perform keyword searches in this index to find scenarios containing the name of a specific module or a mapping identifier in another tool.
We also encountered difficulties when data manipulated by multiple automations was incorrect. To remedy this, we developed a tool that allows us, based on an identifier, to find all automation executions that manipulated this data. In this situation, we simultaneously launch a Javascript script on several pre-selected scenarios, which performs full-text searches in the execution histories of Make.
Recognizing that we are not infallible, despite our best intentions, good practices, and established conventions, we also decided to subject our automations to a peer “review.” Additionally, we created automations that automatically check compliance with best practices and conventions as far as possible.
Implementing on-demand coaching and training sessions
Our modest team dedicated to automations has now achieved a satisfactory initial level of expertise. However, it was imperative to recognize and value the automation creators who were present in the company before the formation of our team. Being aware of the need to maintain a small team size, it was out of the question to deprive these individuals of their achievements or force them to migrate their existing automations to Make.
Therefore, we opted for a coaching approach, providing assistance by advising and guiding them in their daily tasks of maintenance and automation creation. These individuals thus retain responsibility for the systems they have implemented and we are present to support them and answer their questions.
To enhance their technical expertise, we organized several training sessions. Additionally, we introduced office hours slots in our schedules, offering anyone the opportunity to discuss automations with us. These discussions can cover clarification of the automation concept, exploration of possibilities offered by no-code tools, analysis of functional needs, or the resolution of technical challenges.
Conclusion
Dozens of hours saved across several teams
After nine months and numerous projects, our dedicated customer onboarding team has significantly improved its efficiency. By skillfully integrating project management tools with those dedicated to appointment scheduling, client portals, information retrieval, email communication, and satisfaction surveys, the team members have been able to work more efficiently, saving dozens of hours of manual tasks each month.
Our Care team, responsible for addressing customer and user inquiries about our products, has optimized its members’ time by saving four hours per month through automation that synchronizes data between our CRM and Support Desk, eliminating manual cross-referencing searches.
Billing management by our Finance team has been greatly streamlined with daily updated data, saving approximately two hours of monthly work. This increased efficiency will ensure greater peace of mind, especially in the face of the expected increase in the number of signed contracts each month.
What we’ve learned
The implementation of these projects highlighted the importance of proper communication channels with other teams, allowing us to gather their needs, collaborate on building and testing new technical solutions, and intervene quickly in case of any issues.
Unfortunately, our attempt to assist our Video Production team faced difficulties. This team produces and publishes hundreds of videos on our platform every week, allowing our clients to promote their corporate culture, and the candidates to envision themselves in their future company during the application process. Our attempt to automate the weekly upload of hundreds of videos online failed. We learned that automation requires appropriate tools with connectors or APIs for effective integration into a complex system. Today, we are more vigilant and provide guidance to business teams on how to choose tools with integration capabilities, ensuring our ability to achieve future integrations.
Currently we are overseeing nearly 150 automations, but we know this is just the beginning. The Marketing and Business teams, once autonomous for simple automations, are increasingly turning to us with growing ambitions. And we are aiming to bring our expertise to other teams often overlooked by IT teams, such as human resources, legal, and office management.
The outlook for 2024
The year 2024 will bring its own share of innovations. Currently, our focus is on automating tasks related to specific business processes. However, we have observed that by developing internal solutions, teams can significantly improve their efficiency and working day. Rather than using multiple off-the-shelf tools that do not perfectly meet their needs, they could benefit from custom products. To achieve this, we are considering evolving our team towards “low-code” technical expertise and adopting work methods more akin to a product team.
We also intend to contribute more to the entire company by creating more generic tools, allowing all employees to quickly accomplish various tasks such as searching through our business tools, translating documents, booking meeting rooms, etc. Furthermore, we have not yet explored the possible applications of generative AIs and the benefits they could offer.
Regarding our relationships with other teams, we acknowledge that there is still progress to be made, whether in our emerging and fragile relationships with ambassadors within the business teams or in our communication with teams that have not yet sought our services. We need to better showcase what we are capable of and help teams visualize the benefits we could bring them.
Finally, we are excited to welcome the Otta team to WTTJ this year. This collaboration provides an opportunity to broaden our perspectives and explore other issues and interesting best practices.
Written by Clément Folliet, Business technology manager @ WTTJ
Edited by Anne-Laure Civeyrac
Illustration by WTTJ
