Analytics and Documentation: Integral part of RPA
RPA: An Evolution, Emergence and new way of AUTOMATION. We all know as Automation Tester’s, how integral and important is to document everything which makes our life easy and specially during the MAINTENANCE phase.
Whenever and wherever AUTOMATION exist and hope of AUTOMATION exist. Maintenance and New way of doing operations comes as a shadow.
As an automation enthusiast, I just thought to share my experience that how documentation makes my project life easy or why, this is important in this phase where we say the deliveries/deployments of task bots are just few weeks life cycle.
For sure when we talk about PROCESS AUTOMATION, few instant checkpoints comes in our mind like
- Feasibility Study
- Where we are standing (AS-IS Process) – What we would like to achieve (TO-BE)
- Tool Selection & ROI
- Questionnaire
As soon as tool selected and project starts, the major part of documentation starts where new way of working needs to be defined like
- New Solution Definition
- New roles and responsibilities with new line of working
- Business Requirement Document
Now, I should say Thanks to Blue Prism for defining the proper and dedicated outline for all the above documents and the new version is like
- Feasibility Study -- “Initial Process Analysis”
- AS-IS process or SOP -- “Process Definition Document”
- Questionnaire -- “Functional Requirement Questionnaire”
- New Solution Definition (TO BE) -- “Solution Design Document”
- New roles and responsibilities with new line of working (TO BE) -- “Operational Impact Document”
- BRD -- “Process Design Instruction” + “Object Design Instruction”
As in current state, automated solutions deployment and implementation life cycle is too small than the question arises why we need DOCUMENTS like SDD, OID, PDD or ODI. Somewhere, AS-IS process is sufficient and can work as a REQUIREMENT doc with few questionnaire’s.
Is this really looks like a balanced approach I doubt. In current state it looks like HAPPY life that we are building the BOTS and they are operational. We are happy because are able to see the ROI at run time.
But, what we will do when something stuck in PROD and LOGS are not enough to resolve the issue or after an year or so when we reach on to the state of MAINTENANCE due to CR’s or if the same AUTOMATED solution require evolution into it.
All HARD WORK done in past in documentation will make our life easy and helps us to reach onto solution in quick span of time.
My point of view says that after implementation of few projects the ORACLE of FEASIBILITIES, ANALYTICS & DOCUMENTATION will help us to grow our experience. In near future this experience eventually leads to less estimations for this initial phase of RPA life cycle.
Somewhere, Analytics, Feasibility are the GOLDEN THUMB RULE. The time spent initially leads to less struggle in future.