Some tips for your automation journey

During the past couple of posts we looked at some concepts of an automation journey, but how should one approach this automation implementation?

What should be considered??

With this brief, we look at some useful tips to get you going:

?1.??????Understand the candidate process by consistently repeating the same steps over a period of time with the same results. This ensures that you have an understanding of the inputs and expected outputs.

2.??????Start small, start with a simple use cases for everyday operations like resetting passwords, cleaning files and or restarting services.

3.??????Identify quick wins, and hereby generating immediate business value with high return on investment use cases. This generates buy-in from stakeholders.

4.??????Design reusable flows, insert sub-flows inside other flows and parallelize when possible. These are simpler and faster, and saves time on rebuilding the same operations.

5.??????Make error-handling workflows reusable too, error-handling workflows helps to manage exceptions consistently and simplify troubleshooting.

6.??????Work with what you have, integrate existing scripts, playbooks, modules into your workflows. You can also connect workflows with the service management environment and monitoring tools to unify automation and create greater efficiencies.

7.??????Monitor your orchestration environment, take a proactive approach to monitoring your automation with alerts and automated remediation. This provides insight into the return on investment as well as on how successful the automation program is.

8.??????Document your workflows, reduce errors and release faster by documenting the automation flows,?what the purpose is, the business case addressed, systems involved. This ensures that there is a consistent understanding of the automation use case which assists in understanding impact and relevancy.

Maybe manage your automation flows as configuration items?

9.??????Plan for business continuity, build reliable disaster recovery plans with automation workflows. Test your disaster recovery plan every time the environment changes and update your plan continuously.

10.??Offer one-click services, empower users with self-service request fulfillment. Offer predefined processes that can be triggered from a self-service portal. Design for all types of users. For example, first-line IT admins can run flows for basic IT tasks, such as reset passwords and file clean-ups. DevOps engineers can request virtual machine provisioning and human resource personnel can onboard new employees by creating user accounts and ordering equipment.

?A good rule of thumb to introduce automation to a process, would be to take an approach that any process that is well understood and has a standardized approach.

What are your thoughts on these tips, want to add any? Please share them below.