First steps in automations (part 2/2)
A step by step guide to start your first automations. To start is always the hardest part, and a good start can give a great feeling in the following steps, even when things might go wrong.
3. Estimation, Estimation, Estimation
You must estimate three things:
Optimized hours - Estimate optimized hours roughly, as precise calculations are often difficult. For example, 15 users x 15 minutes x 20 days equals 75 hours monthly..
It's important to make that estimation because there are some solutions used by the entire company, and with only 15 minutes optimized per day you can gain a lot of hours monthly.
Development cost - again is hard to estimate precisely. You can think in terms of days: 0.5 for simple scenarios, 1 for medium ones, and 2 for difficult ones. I. If you don’t have the internal capabilities to do it, take a rough estimation from an agency or a developer, which will help you to decide on the next step.
Business impact - the most important step, you should constantly ask yourself or your stakeholders: what’s the impact of having this in alignment with business goals?
Again, be honest with yourself or challenge your stakeholders. Every manager will try to overestimate their department's impact. For example, automating offers would help almost any business. It would help more than automating contract generation.
4. Prioritisation
Feel free to use any prioritization framework for this step; if you already have one, use it. If not, take a look at RICE, Value vs Effort, and MoSCoW; these work great in this situation. Also, you can take into consideration the Cost of Delay framework; it’s very relevant for automation in a simplified version.
You can download my template for mapping and prioritization from here.
Conclusion
Like anything else, the first step is to have a strong plan. This is especially important if you or your company lack experience in automation.
If you have no experience or want some small wins, start with minor tasks. They may not be at the top of your list.
Each company should have time to map their processes. They should see how automation will improve them. They should also learn new processes.
Start with small and easy steps.
Keep in touch
For any further questions, I’m waiting for your email at cristian@filimon.tech with your automation challenges (not tasks).
I’m happy to discuss and talk through them, to find the right solution. The only condition is to publish a case study in this newsletter about it (with all the data anonymized, of course).
See you soon!
Cristian