What are the most effective ways to document and share RPA best practices and standards?

?? How to Document and Share RPA Best Practices and Standards: 1.Continuous Documentation: Maintaining continuous documentation is imperative, given that RPA processes are susceptible to requirement changes. Design documents should be consistently updated to reflect the evolving landscape. 2.Knowledge Sharing Sessions: These forums provide an opportunity to discuss innovative solutions implemented in RPA projects. These sessions contribute to the improvement and enhancement of the standard code review checklist, which undergoes continuous updates. 3.Pair Programming: This involves pairing a junior developer with an experienced counterpart. This collaborative approach allows the junior developer to gain valuable insights.

Short form methods for documenting and sharing RPA best practices and standards: 1. SOPs 2. Intranet/Wiki 3. Training Materials 4. Version Control 5. Collaboration Tools 6. Knowledge Sharing Sessions 7. RPA CoE 8. Templates and Checklists 9. Knowledge Repository 10. Peer Review 11. Documentation Tools 12. Feedback Mechanism 13. Case Studies 14. Cross-Functional Collaboration 15. Regular Updates

Managing RPA process versioning requires utmost precision at all times. Creating a template requires multiple rounds of feedback from different user groups and/or stakeholders. What is not mentioned in the AI expert article is that you need a 4-eye principle. This controlling mechanism is used to facilitate delegation of authority and increase transparency. A developer may not release a project without third party (code) review. There is a lot to go into detail here. Regarding the template, when working using Scrum Framework, documentation is good when its just-enough. Certain elements change alot, this would require alot of maintenance in the documentation template. Attempt to make the template as generic as possible.

1. Create a centralized repository: Use a knowledge management system to store and organize best practices and standards. 2. Clear documentation: Write detailed and user-friendly guides. 3. Regular training: Conduct training sessions for RPA teams. 4. Peer review: Encourage team members to review and contribute. 5. Updates: Keep documents current and ensure easy accessibility for the team.

Here are the documents that you must have. - Process maps - As is and To be - Solution design document (SDD) - Business case figures for each process - AHT, Volumes, Volume frequency, FTE, manual exception rates - Code library - Component definitions or brief descriptions of each re-usable component - The most forgotten document - ‘Operational handbook’ (This is critical when in production. Imagine not knowing how to handle an exception or whom to contact when there is an issue with a process, what’s the BCP plan when something fails? All such information is stored in the document) Think of it as a user manual that explains where everything is kept, how does it all come together, how it was made, who built it, who owns what part, etc.)

Technical Documents and Process defination documents should go hand to hand and coordinate each other. We should always follow best practices in document preparion also because both documents will play crutial role while doing any improvemts and enhancemts. It always give better understanding in version management and process knowledge. Every module in Process defination should have proper detailed Technical details.

In UiPath the ideation tool offering called Automation hub also acts like the centralized document repository for the automation ideas and solutions. In addition to it there can be a generic idea for a CoE and all CoE related templates and governance documents can be added in that entry. The same idea can be applied to any RPA solution.

I do not agree with the expert article to use a Repository rather than a collaboration tool publicly accessible for all who can and want to contribute. There are plenty of other collaboration tools which also have version, page or activity history tracker built-in. Do not overcomplicate your landscape if easier solutions are proven to be as effective. One I have positive experience with is Confluence (from Atlassian) which is officially sold as a document(ation) sharing platform whereas repositories are often used to host public and private code from and for software developers. Not all RPA tools use 'code' therefore from my perspective a tool like Confluence is perfectly fine to store, share, update and maintain documentations.

Having a clearly documented RPA approach document is key and more importantly, that being shared with a wider audience in the organisation. Ensure you cover everything from Why we did this to where to start, whom to contact, where to login, what’s the process from ideation to development to ongoing maintenance. Making all these easily accessible will help you scale your program.

There are multiple RPA Lifecycles freely available. The difficulty is that the content of the framework is empty. It tells you which phases exist, which are much alike regular software development projects. Analysis, Development, Test and Release/Maintenance. This is nothing special, everyone could think of this. Tailoring the framework to your organisation needs is much tougher job and in some situations this needs to be properly addressed by a set of highly experienced RPA consultants or Infra/DevOps engineers. Each phase in your lifecycle represents a set of steps, work instructions, supporting software, automated processes and documentation/administration. This is very important and will cost a signficant amount of time to perfectionize

If you want to capture all the details and the changes I think it should be an on-going document beginning from the Process Discovery phase until the Bot is deployed to production. I say this because most of the times no matter how perfect we make the solution design there are some changes that are incorporated ad hoc which then are missed out in the documents

The most effective ways to document and share RPA best practices and standards include creating comprehensive documentation, using collaboration tools like Confluence or SharePoint, conducting regular training sessions, and establishing a centralized repository for RPA artifacts and guidelines. Also you must ensure that all these best practices and standards are communities in the team effectively and is being followed.

Aside from the technical aspects, it is also good to keep an end user documentation. Something like a user manual for the stakeholders in cases of run-on-demand RPAs. Putting it up in Confluence is a good way to keep track of the changes made on the documentation. The visibility to stakeholders on what the RPA exactly does will also improve end users' trust to their robot helpers.