Dedicated Automation Production Support Services - Part 5 of 5 Ways an Automation Partner Can Accelerate Your Program Right Now

So far in this series, I’ve covered process discovery with knowledge domain experts, enterprise grade automation development, development mentoring, and “bot” health checks. In the final week of this mini-series, I’m covering one of the most overlooked elements of a successful automation program: dedicated production support for automation solutions.

Who monitors your production automation solutions? What happens when they don’t perform as expected? Who is responsible for fixing them when they break?

When I ask my customers these questions, I get the same answer almost every time: companies are using the same developers that build automation solutions to monitor and fix issues in production.

For context, when I ask the same customers about support for their ERP system, without hesitation, they tell me about their dedicated support team that works around the clock to ensure proper functionality and up-time.

This makes me wonder: given the increasing importance of the work being performed by automated solutions, why aren’t organizations adopting the same dedicated support mechanisms to monitor and manage automation runtime?

If you think about it, just as with an ERP implementation, the entire automation program and it’s desired targets, outcomes, and goals ultimately rely on an effective production support engine. All the hard work and effort expended by the analysis, design, development, and testing teams will be reduced if the automated solution isn’t effectively monitored and managed.

Fact check: developers with competing priorities can’t perform effectively in the same ways a dedicated support team can. 

Understandably, adding another support function to an organizational structure isn’t easy. But let me make one thing clear: the answer is most certainly NOT to throw it at your IT team by default. Like most IT teams, they probably have way too much on their plate already, but more importantly, most IT teams aren’t trained (and don’t have time to become trained) on proper monitoring and management of automation solutions. 

So your automation developers are swamped - being pulled back and forth between new builds and production support - and your IT team either can’t consume support, or they aren’t able to consume it effectively. How will you overcome this challenge to grow your automation program?

You might find yourself in a double-edged sword situation: your program isn’t growing so you can’t justify a dedicated production support team, but you believe the program will grow if you can offload production support from your development team.

In this situation, a production support engagement with a service provider may be exactly what you need to get over the hurdle. 

A service provider can come in on day one, perform due diligence surrounding your existing production automations, and within a few short weeks, hit the ground running with an SLA-driven production support model. They can provide real-time support coverage that meets the demands and business criticality of your production automation solutions, and their resources are trained within the respective automation tools that they support. 

When evaluating service providers and their production support capabilities, look for four things: 

1. Their experience in delivering production support for large-scale automation programs
2. Their commitment to due diligence (pre-work before executing support)
3. Their intent to engage and communicate with business process owners throughout support delivery (related to business rules, exception details, etc.)
4. Their breadth of capabilities and deliverables offered within their support model 

Failure to implement dedicated production support will frustrate your developers, diminish the quality of your automation solutions, delay overall time to value, and delay automation program growth.  In contrast, a dedicated support team will enable real-time monitoring, timely reactions and adjustments, efficient development, and better service for the overall mission of the automation program.

Drop a comment and let me know how your organization is handling production support for automation solutions.

Thanks for joining me throughout this five-part mini series. I hope you enjoyed the dialogue. Stay tuned for more Intelligent Automation insights in the future!

About Darin

Darin is an experienced professional in the Intelligent Automation industry with a background in traditional IT services, RPA development, project management, and automation project implementation. Fun fact: he was one of the first Blue Prism developers in North America.

In his current role with Agilify Automation, Darin leverages his development and implementation knowledge to support an enterprise sales organization as a Senior Solution Engineer. Having engaged with well over 100 prospects and customers in various stages of automation maturity, Darin has practical experience uncovering automation program challenges and aligning automation services and solutions in order to promote value, quality, self-sufficiency, and enterprise scale. 

Darin has spoken on stage at several industry conferences and in front of leadership teams for several fortune 500 companies, advising each audience on the best ways to navigate the current and future state of Intelligent Automation.

Connect with me on LinkedIn and drop me a message! I'd enjoy a conversation about Intelligent Automation and the successes/challenges you've experienced.  

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