The 3 Most Overlooked Components

• Automation team capacity planning
• Stakeholder alignment & agreements
• Change Management planning

Develop a true capacity plan for your automation operating team & CoE so you can be sure they have both the skills and capacity for successful Intake, Build and Run of your automation program.

Math is hard…but, it’s essential to calculate the Intake, Build and Run capacity of your core automation team to ensure you can hit your automation business case goals. You’ve sold your automation program to your executive ranks and now you need to come through on the promise. Your business case likely includes both hard financial benefits plus soft benefits such as process efficiencies, compliance adherence, and an improved customer and employee experience.

• How many people do you need to design, build and manage bots to support all the automations you’ve promised?
• What skills do they need?
• What’s the cost of that?
• What percent of people’s time are you realistically expecting to count on?
• If you’re counting on the promise of democratization of automation through a citizen developer strategy, how do you calculate the output of that?
• What amount of assessment time have you assumed is required for a simple process verses a complex process?

The answers to all these questions should be considered and modeled in an automation team capacity plan. Your model should include different throughput and skill level assumptions for full time RPA developers verses citizen developers.

Invest the time and energy to ensure stakeholder alignment and agreement across your IT, Business, InfoSec, and Compliance teams.

Whether you’re a business or technology leader, you will be relying on stakeholders elsewhere to achieve your automation goals. For example, you’ll need IT for infrastructure, vendor management, and support services. You also must be compliant and operate securely within policy. These functions represent critical dependencies for your automation program. A thorough investment of time and trust building is required.

Have those hard conversations or cross-team working sessions early on to document clear, agreed-upon definitions, governance rules, service levels, and roles in context of required processes.

A successful automation program has a trail of just enough documentation to clarify the rules of the road. Examples are compliance and information security requirements for bot builders, an internal license management policy for your automation platform (when do you invest in more licenses?), code development and source control policies & procedures, support service levels & escalation criteria, to list a few. Time invested up front to address stakeholder dependencies will pay off as you scale your automation program.

Include a Change Management Plan at the launch of your program to buck the risk of failure.

Do you want fries with that burger? How about change management with your automation program? Let’s sequence this the right way. Let’s start with change management and the “why.”

Recent consultancy studies tell us that a third of automation programs are stuck or even failing. The reasons? The reasons are the usual suspects: lack of a clear “why” for the program, lack of clear measurable business impact metrics, lack of leader sponsorship and team-level understanding and buy-in. Platform providers will sell you bot licenses, but it’s up to you to define and land the automation program successfully.

We see success rates go way up when change management activities are built into your automation program from the beginning. Key elements include getting sponsors and executives aligned around a clear why for the program, including measurable business impacts. Consider a single point of accountability to own the overall change management plan and win story creation & publication process. This role can also curate and lead the engagement of your automation champion network. Get started with the most simple tools like an FAQ — and even better is an RPA-driven chat bot, which you can brag about. People like a place to go to find out more, like a landing page experience and front door to your program. Just keep it maintained. Consider UiPath’s Automation Hub. And finally, don’t forget the human connection component: hold town halls and lunch & learns to drive messaging and engagement and answer questions. still work like a charm, such as monthly ‘lunch & learns’ and town hall-style meetings.

These are a great way to build trust and educate people on what is RPA and why we’re doing it. Are you hoping to get more people involved or counting on democratized automation and an active citizen developer community? These events are a great way to make the ask: who wants to get involved?

Don’t underestimate the need for change management. And don’t wait until after you’ve launched your program. The data is saying that would be too late.