Guide to managing a successful RPA project
Today, intelligent automation in corporations is already part of our daily lives, and therefore will continue to gain more ground in the near future. Therefore, many industries are implementing Robotic Process Automation or RPA withing their organizations, as automation is no longer an alternative, but a necessity. Even today we are beginning to hear interesting topics such as “A robot for every employee” and its corresponding analysis looking for answers to questions such as would the employee be more productive or less productive, could the robot replace the employee? This are questions that we would like to discuss in a future post. In the meantime we are going to comment on the 7 things to avoid and care in an RPA project.
Below are 7 steps to avoid achieving a successful project with RPA.
- Need for RPA training for developers (lack of RPA skills and lack of knowledge of the tool).
- Inadequate or deficient communication channels.
- Poor change management in participating departments.
- Poorly defined success criteria (scope, budget, achievement of business objectives, execution times, size of the work team, etc.).
- Activities to be automated that are not economically viable or whose degree of complexity is very high.
- Lack of vision and ambition in the automation project with RPA (not having an End to End scope of the Processes to be automated, since it is not known: What to implement? When to implement? And Why to implement?
- Lack of IT preparation (lack of knowledge of technological infrastructure in the organization) and low or no Change Management.
The points mentioned above can help you manage and avoid the most common mistakes that generate obstacles and resistance to change within organizations, since not having a clear vision of transformation will lead directly to the failure of the project.
Recently, in a project where I had the opportunity to participate in a company in the financial industry of retirement savings, special care was taken not to fall into some of the points mentioned above, as well as to get out as soon as possible of some of them in which we were stuck. To do this, we had to implement the appropriate methodologies that represented a formal process, incorporating a series of well defined methods for the analysis, design, implementation and testing of software and systems. It was then that we decided to implement agile methodologies with Scrum, having working sessions (Sprints) in which we defined 3 main things that I describe below.
3 factors to consider in agile methodologies and RPA projects
- Current picture of the processes
- Deficiencies and areas for improvement
- And initiatives currently underwear to improve the process
This survey picture detailed the flows of each business process, providing the client with a measurement of the current process sizing, sub-processes and activities based on KPIs (volume, time, FTEs). This photo consisted of flow charts based on BPM methodology (As-Is, To-Be), use case modeling, process profile, functional document, QA’s, and Testing. In this way, the development and implementation of each proposed process was successfully carried out with RPA using the Automation Anywhere platform and exceeding the customer’s expectations.
That is why you must ensure that you have a specialized team in each of the phases of the project such as the Business Process Consultants who document and evaluate the impact of the automations and the Developers of the selected RPA platform, who monitor each progress of new implementations, building a team of excellence that will allow you to take advantage of all automation opportunities and maintain the vision of the project
