- Standard RPA Implementation
- How to Implement RPA in Agile Sprints
- Iterative Improvements from the As-Is to To-Be processes

Standard RPA Implementation

Company X is sick and tired of manual, repetitive work! They decide to invest in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate their repetitive mundane tasks and increase employee morale. They install the automation software and hold design sessions to determine potential automation candidates. Process documents are created and approved for development to begin. A developer will automate the selected process, in its entirety. This development time tracks at 6–8 weeks for a completed product. At this time, 3 months after the first design session was scheduled the final product is delivered to a Company X employee for user testing.

Help! Where did all these bugs come from? The first set of issues with the automated process arise immediately. An employee forgot to mention a workaround for non-US vendors in the process, an IT resource didn’t realize the process is utilizing employee credentials to login and operate business applications, and the Company X business analyst states the GUI layout between the production environment and test environment are slightly different.

The long and unexpected road of debugging begins. This continues until the entire process has been refined in some way. User acceptance testing is now complete! Nothing can go wrong; we only have quality assurance and Pre-Production testing remaining until the process is published to production applications for monitoring. Yikes!

Agile RPA Implementation

Let’s restart with a better approach, Company X just bought 10+ RPA licenses. Their business needs RPA to bridge the foundational gaps in their business structure or ERP system. How should they implement the automation program? They do some research and decide to move forward with an Agile project management framework. Company X hires a consultant partner to step in and manage and their new Automation X program. A Scrum Master will facilitate ceremonies to compile an automation backlog, refine backlog items for clear and improved requirements, and adapt work and deliverables in defined sprints throughout the project. The sprint ceremonies are as follows…

Sprint 0: A discovery workshop is held to collect the automation backlog and process definition requirements in a Process Definition Document (PDD). The automation backlog will be defined with clear requirements and advanced to a build stage with quick and scalable foundations for RPA gain. The process development is broken into sprints with sprint planning. Each sprint is determined by process functionality and delivered with a human in the loop component until the process is completed.

Sprint Refinement: During a sprint a small team will re-evaluate the automation backlog and rewrite backlog items. They refine development exception criteria, escalate issues, remove roadblocks, highlight potential workarounds, motivate the team, and assign story points to the process. Company X end users are included in the development process and sprint deliverables. Their requests are documented and refined at each sprint.

Sprint Retrospectives: At the end of a sprint, the Scrum Master will facilitate a sprint retrospective ceremony to adapt the work with both success and growth criteria before entering the next sprint.

Iterative Improvements for the To-Be Processes

Automation can jazz up your solution in half the development time! Are you looking for a cost effective, 24/7 online worker to improve and strengthen current solutions?

Then leveraging an agile project management framework for a company’s RPA implementation has tangible project results due in part to the iterative nature of sprint planning. Process backlogs are created and updated throughout sprints. As new requirements are discovered, they are incorporated and addressed in deliverables. Automation's are delivered in attended packages and tested for improvements with end users. You may ask, how does this affect my As-Is process flow? The process adding a new automation opportunity to the backlog is simpler with an agile framework. Once completed and delivered the automation will already have tried and true testing roots in an application. Additionally, any RPA anxiety from Company X is mitigated through sprint ceremonies and team visibility.