Your team is struggling to keep up with project demands. What tools can help automate your workflows?

When one is buried in tasks, finding the right tools can be a game-changer. For example: To keep everyone on track, Trello or Asana is a no-brainer; they lay out who's doing what and when. Jenkins or CircleCI for coding without hiccups. Testing? Selenium's great at automating the grunt work. Slack or Google Chat can keep mailboxes clear of email avalanches. Google Workspace is a collaboration superhero, smoothing out document sharing and editing. And when wondering where time flies, Toggl can come to the rescue. Roll these out bit by bit, adjusting and ensuring everything clicks just right before you go big.

Before the tool though, make sure your team have every key project properly documented, considering: goals, challenges, risks, mitigation plan, project committee etc. Many projects fail because the PM did not scoped the project well, leading to lack of buy in, lack of support, poor workload management, and the list goes on. Now that you have you project well scoped and aligned with your key stakeholders and collaborators: I love using Monday.com - for their flexibility to accommodate all sort of workflows and how easy they integrate with most of my tech stack.

In my experience i have seen professionals creating and tracking manual reports from a source or multiple source and presenting it to the team, executives. Instead always leverage the dashboards/reports in the tools and generate customized live reports, dashboards. Ex: Tableau Dashboard/Reports for Test Metrics, Status progress from ALM,, JIRA Copado/Salesforce Dashboard/reports for KPI's in Salesforce Implementation. Jira Dashboard's We could have single pane of glass (Google site page/webpage) which provides a view to all the key meaningful KPI's and metrics and publish the link to be bookmarked by the stakeholders.

In my experience workflow automation was a key component to streamline the administrative aspects of many projects. It really shed a bright light on how inefficient many of our process were due to repetitive work and human error. Workflow automation truly buttoned up the loose ends and tightened up our operations. The ROI was nearly immediate.

We used 3 separate tools to complete our suite of automation utilities. Two did all the heavy lifting for large processes and the third handled smaller data copies and transport.

We created a simple Release wide test metrics and KPI by collaborating with Business UAT, Scrum QA teams and implementing some best practices in their google sheet test reports and created a master Release test google sheet which mapped/linked to other teams google sheet to have the live data during the Release Implementation.

Hands down Zenphi is the best no-code workflow automation solution on the market. The cost to implement is low and can easily be maintained by a single resource with a basic understanding of process automation.

The 3 most important automation hacks in my experience are: 1) GPTs - Create your own custom GPTs using plain English to automate your recurring tasks. Engage on social media, write emails, format SOPs etc. 2) Make.com - Full on automation mode. thousands of integrations, tons of tutorials. Great stuff. 3) CRM - If you're not using a CRM you're wasting a ton of time on stuff that could have been workflow automated.

I cannot overstate how much an organization is losing by not implementing a workflow automation solution. For example, I was able to design an end to end vendor management solution using Zenphi and Google Workspace. This included RFP, scheduling, field photo captures, RFI, etc.

This applies to all aspects of work and personnel life. ROI, Feasibility, and value of automation should definitely be assessed to realize the true benefits.

Make a list of your objectives. From there pull out the quick wins and get those implemented right away. That will allow the end users to get acquainted with the product while you develop the more complex workflows.

I personally use an inspired "Marie Kondo" or "Home Edit" approach when automating complex processes. It looks something like this: Bring all the pain points to the table, determine priorities/zones you want to address, document a visual of existing process before editing and simplifying, once verified share a simplified approach with key stakeholders, then implement and edit as you go.