In this era of fast paced development using rapid prototyping & automation, majority of companies and clients are looking at repeated tasks to be automated by adding couple of lines of code to reduce the workaround time and to improve the performance of teams.

Especially in Information Technology Industry we see a lot of emphasis on automation either in terms of building software or in terms of streamlining business or the way we work. Everyone of us might be working at some or other piece to be automated knowingly or unknowingly. Its good to automated some of the processes so that companies can show significant reduction in man hours and by that saving in $$ they spend on it.

However Automation requires lot of analysis and also step by step implementation. I hear lot of people saying we are doing a lot of automation but our client always rejects our efforts. When i discuss with those people in details i understand couple of similarities in implementation due to which the efforts in automation are wasted. This post covers some of the things which cause automation to fail.

Following are the key things to keep in mind while planning for Automation.

Analysis of complete business process which is to be automated either as full or part before starting.

Planning the Implementation with Step by Step Approach rather than all at a time.

Streamline and formulate the automation outcome as Business Process.

Understand and keep in mind that automation is not a resource utilization strategy or for bench management.

Don’t stop in between, If you cant complete as a whole make the component completed to be available & Integrated as part.

When an Automation effort is wasted everyone of us will start playing ballgame where we will keep on blaming each other without even trying to understand what went wrong and what went well. In my perspective one should immediately start looking at what went well rather than what went wrong. But majority of us stick to what went wrong looking at our dark side rather than our capabilities which is successful.

Not many of the automation efforts will be successful in the first attempt and hence understanding what went well in the last attempt makes it successful.