So you want to automate tasks and free up your team. What comes next?

With our clients, we follow the same process every time.. For companies looking to automate their own tasks, we recommend following a similar system.

Identification: Finding the Right Tasks to Automate

The foundation of any automation initiative is to identify which tasks to hand over to technology. An Activity Log is your first step, acting as a ledger for every task you perform throughout your day. Log each task, the time it consumes, and rate your enjoyment or dislike on a scale of 1 (hate it) to 5 (love it). The tasks that rank lowest on this scale are prime candidates for automation. These are usually the repetitive, low-complexity tasks that, when automated, can yield significant time savings and reduce frustration.

Optimization: Streamlining Before Automating

After identifying what to automate, you must optimize the process. This step can be performed by anyone in the team, though Process Specialists or Analysts typically lead the charge. Break down the task into detailed steps and map the entire process, including the data that enters and exits each stage.

Question everything about the process: What is done? Why is it done this way? Who does it? When is it done? How is it done?

Through this scrutiny, you’ll often find efficiencies and shortcuts that can be made even before you bring in automation. Also, be sure to document any variations to standard procedures to ensure your future automation can handle exceptional situations.

For us, documenting the process as it’s being done today is called an “As-Is” documentation.  In optimizing it, we call it ‘To-Be.”

After taking a client through the optimization process, she came back to us a few weeks later saying that we saved her over 100 hours per year of work, no automation needed!

Automation: Coding and Consistency

With the task optimized, you can now begin writing code and automating.  No matter if the humans on your team are in the office, sick, out of the office, or forget about it, the task gets done the same way, every time.

Automating the optimized version of the task leads to lower development costs, faster turnaround time, and far less headache than trying to automate a half-baked process map or SOP. Trust us, we’ve learned those less0ns the hard way.

Feature image credit: DALL-E