Due to constantly changing customer expectations, extensions to established development approaches are required if automation initiatives hope to deliver substantial benefits at a massive scale. Large-scale automation requires a foundation that incorporates information about the business and rules for processing transactions in addition to functional requirements.
Accordingly, companies should adopt agile development, agile architecture, and agile project management practices to implement automation technologies successfully. Without it, business process-automation initiatives risk failure due to an inability to handle changes in requirements throughout the project's lifecycle.
Agile approaches focus on the frequent delivery of quality software through rapid iterative development. While agile methods have been used for custom software development for more than a decade, agile project management has only begun to be applied to large-scale business process automation in the several two years.
The first step toward obtaining systematic assistance for agile business process automation software is to apply an agile method. It's not enough to merely enable an application development team to be agile; you must provide agility throughout the company.
Some firms have modified and evolved the scrum framework for process automation to meet this requirement. This "agile automation" method is similar to the scrum, with a few differences.
- Different team leadership.?Agile automation is built around a flexible team design that includes developers, testers, IT employees, and business stakeholders. A product owner from the business leads each team, assisted by a subject-matter expert with industry knowledge of the technology. It's crucial in AI-powered products where a domain expert is required to assess the outputs of AI models properly.
- Planning the roadmap.?Agile automation necessitates a considerable amount of planning before any development work is carried out. For this phase, you'll need to configure the automation project. You'll then need to test it, validate its functionality, and compare it with previous versions regularly. This phase ensures that the automation project will connect with the business as a whole and follow regulatory requirements and other limitations. It also allows stakeholders in affected sections of the company to prepare
- Trigger-driven flow.?The concept of "trigger-driven flow" replaced traditional user stories in agile automation to break down the project into bite-size portions. The first step in the formula is to identify a "trigger event," such as when specific data becomes available, or a user action occurs. The actions needed in response to that event and the output to be created are then defined. Teams may use this technique to break down procedures into manageable parts. In addition, since each chunk's inputs and outcomes are clearly defined, teams can work in parallel, speeding up development efforts (Based on McKinsey survey).
- Prototype flow management.?Automation decouples the release of prototype and production software. Production versions are carried out on a tight timetable in coordination with key business areas to minimize disruption to the whole organization. Prototypes are released into a test environment where their performance is more frequently evaluated on representative data sets.
- Across organizational support.?Because agile automation necessitates significant organizational change, it asks companies to apply new technology and working methods to their most important operations—all at the same time. Even if your organization is small and new, launching an automated solution requires a lot of help. Most companies utilize a specialized program office to provide assistance, develop best practices, and track the progress of the overall automation project.
- Handling uncertainty. In organizations with complex technologies, it is more difficult for employees to reach a common understanding of their customers. A reduction in task uncertainty resulted in the use of horizontal coordination methods and group meetings rather than impersonal coordination techniques.
- You spend the majority of your time running the company.
- You've got many things in progress, but few of them are finished.
- You do not adhere to Agile principles and teach people to leverage agile principles.
- You can't figure out how to handle the dependencies among the teams.
- Your agile teams' velocity is not consistent.
- Your team handles only the most urgent issues.
- You have a large number of support tickets in your backlog and aren't able to create new product features.
- Instead of roles, you rely on specific individuals.
