Training Your Workforce For a Successful UiPath RPA Implementation
You have felt the need for Automating your business processes for a long time and after some initial research and planning, you are now ready to kick the tires and hopefully decided to go with UiPath as your Automation Platform of choice.
Automation Operating Model (AOM)
Part of a successful Automation Strategy is having a plan or a roadmap and identifying the skills gap and having the right people in place and then training them in the tools so that they can start the automation work. It is important that you understand your Current Operating Model (COM) or current state and define an Automation Operating Model (AOM) to manage and sustain the organization-wide automation initiative.
An AOM answers the following questions:
“How do we get started and scale quickly?”
“What resources will we need for a sustainable RPA initiative?”
“What governance, Change Management, Program Management and Infrastructure management policies and practices we require to be successful with automation?”
Defining Roles and Responsibilities and Training your Workforce
Having the right training strategy is crucial to any successful RPA implementation. At a minimum, you would need to identify the different roles and responsibilities that would be needed. You would then need to define a role-based training curriculum that is easy to understand and follow and that walks the trainee gradually into full learning for that role and then scale it across the organization.
Here are the three basic steps to get you going:
- RPA Foundation: As a first step you need to know what RPA is all about so there should be a primer learning course on RPA that introduces the audiences to RPA, the whole automation philosophy and why a "Robot for every person" makes sense.
- Role-Based Training: Once an understanding of RPA is achieved. It is a good idea to look into role-based training. Fortunately, the leg work has already been done by UiPath. They have created an online academy that has certification courses for different roles. Here is the link. While UiPath Academy training should be sufficient as an online resource, you may still need in-person/professional help to get you started or for those situations where you are stuck and need help moving forward. We at Onbotix Services can help you overcome your initial training hurdles. You can count on us for your RPA citizen developer training on StudioX to more advanced topics like process, task mining, Automation hub and AI fabric.
- Train The Trainer: Once the first group of Cohorts is trained and they have had some time to wet their feet on the RPA sands, it probably makes sense to identify people that could be good for training others in the organization. This really helps in scaling the RPA as it gets rolls out to different units or departments within the organization. It also makes sense to have these trainers with dotted line responsibilities to an RPA CoE (Centre of Excellence). In my opinion, training should be part of CoE with trainers embedded in different departments but utilized cross-functionally. Apart from being responsible for a number of areas of RPA implementation a CoE needs to be in charge of the Organization Development Plan (ODP) that really fosters continuous RPA learning across the organization. More on that in a future post. Until then Happy Automation.
Any feedback, comments and thoughts are most appreciated.
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About the Author: Jaideep Kala is a principal at Toronto-based Onbotix Services (aka Satya Consultants Inc.) which provides UiPath Training, process analysis, automation and cognitive AI consulting services to medium and large enterprises.