Understand the process

From time to time people will ask me what's the most important thing to get right before you start down the path of automating a process (or part thereof). I've finally decided that actually the best thing you can arm yourself with is knowledge of the existing process.

Isn't that so obvious? Well it maybe to most people but why is it that time and time again projects are started and in some cases finished, without first of all understanding where the problems are in the initial process. How can you fix something when you don't know where it's broken? The answer is you can't and that's why you find these projects either fail or you end up with massive delays as you're forced to go back and understand the initial problems.

With a platform like OpenSpan, it's possible to rapidly prototype a solution and run it past the business within what could be a matter of hours. This approach helps to show the business users what they'll actually receive once the project goes live and keeps your timelines as short as possible. Francis Carden refers to this as failing faster and I tend to agree with him - it's a nice way to learn what works and what doesn't.

I always tell customers that I want to see the process in action. Show me how you do it today, let me watch the manual task, let me understand the pain. More often that not, with this knowledge we can make tweaks to the process very quickly that will have a massive impact when it becomes automated. This initial work doesn't even have to take up a lot of time - I find that with the small processes we automate, this work can be completed anywhere between 1-4 days (including documentation).

Another obvious point to make that just about everybody fails on, is ensuring you are using like for like systems across your environments. So many projects are delayed by environments being different between development, test and production. These differences are picked up earlier in the development cycle if you've seen how the process is completed the "manual" way and it's documented step by step (including screen shots).

OpenSpan has recently launched the OpenSpan Events product which allows you to monitor generic and custom events from virtually any application. This product can help you understand the current process by monitoring exactly what users do within each application and logging it to a central place. Analysis of this data will give you a good understanding of the problems with the process, for example it's possible to see when a user cuts and pastes the same piece of data across different applications. You could even use OpenSpan Events to check that the systems are the same between your different environments by having it log version numbers as users interact with the applications.

One of the major benefits of using the OpenSpan platform is to decrease the time it takes to integrate your applications and automate your processes. With a typical project lasting around 5 weeks from start to finish, if you're not prepared to start this rapid development approach you'll see project times extended and you'll loose some of the benefits we bring to the table.