4 Ways to manage up for automation
For organizations to gain the full benefit of process automation, developers need to be more intimately involved in automation projects. They need to have more say in how these initiatives are constructed, how they’re carried out and how they’re improved.
Automation initiatives aren’t set-it-and-forget-it projects. They must tie in with end-to-end organizational processes, which will evolve over time. Organizations don’t want to bake in processes that won’t suit them two months or two years from now. With this in mind, process automation needs to be nimble, adaptable and smart–and it’s developers who have the skills and the insights needed to drive these initiatives forward, impacting broader organizational success.
To take on this larger role, though, developers must be given the right resources, tools and access to make their voices heard. Part of this is empowering them to manage up to senior leaders–on both the IT and business sides–to advocate for the types of automation projects that can drive true digital transformation.
Here are four ways they can do it.
Build Automation Demos
The biggest enemy of a process automation project is time. The C-suite and senior IT leaders don’t want to spend months–if not years–debating the merits and feasibility of automating a series of tasks. They want to know quickly whether a project is viable and whether they should commit resources to it.
Developers can set a project on the right course by creating a basic demo. It doesn’t need to integrate the complicated set of dependencies planned for the finished project; it just has to show people in power that the project will work. Demonstrate how a manual calculation project gets triggered by a quarterly deadline and estimate the time it will save a department on an ongoing basis. Show the leadership that the pain point workers have cited on feedback reports can be solved.
Show Proven Examples
While a demo visualizes how a process can work, a use case can illustrate how such a process has worked in another setting. Examples can be found in any number of places–in a formal case study, a tech article, a GitHub posting, a developer message board or materials supplied by a technology partner. Developers should tap their networks to get advice and run scenarios by peers. The goal is to find a situation where someone solved a similar problem with a manageable set of procedures–and it worked. Having a solid example takes the initiative out of the theoretical realm and gives the developer more credibility.
Get an Enterprise Architect on Board
Once the demo and the use case are secured, the next step is getting buy-in on the vision for the automation initiative. This is the domain of the enterprise architect. It’s important for a developer to get this person on board as an ally. They should work with the enterprise architect to ensure that the set of tasks fits into the company’s architecture – today and in the future. If the company is pursuing a microservices strategy, the developer needs to show how automating a series of product quality checks can be accomplished inside this technology infrastructure.
Keep Things Simple
While organizations try hard to operate in an agile manner, sometimes that’s easier said than done. The people developers report to like to plan. Enterprise architects like to define perfect, future-proof architectures. The C-suite likes to envision scenarios and debate ramifications. Developers can break logjams by encouraging others to avoid the temptation to drown in detail. They should get comfortable with the concept, the demo, the use case and the vision–in that order–and then roll it out to the larger organization.
While process automation is widely seen as being vital to business transformation, building a project is often more challenging than it needs to be. Encouraging developers to take on larger roles can help organizations move automation initiatives past square one and on the path to digital transformation.
DevOps and automation are two key components that help organizations streamline the development process. This results in two significant changes:
Increasing cross-department/inter-team collaboration
Automating manual and repetitive tasks in the development process
The combination of DevOps with automation leads to a more efficient SDLC, contact us to start working with our devops teams and improve your systems development life cycle.
Source: devops.com
