Agile methodologies streamline the development of attended automation robots by enhancing collaboration between business users and developers.
Organizations around the world are embracing robotic process automation (RPA) to drive business efficiencies, elevate productivity and improve customer service. We are seeing more and more enterprises embrace attended automation to help augment employees’ capabilities and help them to execute desktop tasks more efficiently and effectively.
Many companies are finding that agile methodologies have an invaluable role to play in developing these attended automations. It’s a perfect pairing of technology and methodology. Building attended automations requires continuous user feedback and interaction. The same is true for developing with agile. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits.
A Collaborative Approach
The agile life-cycle enables true collaboration between developers and business-users. The development process is broken into small iterations called ‘sprints’ in which valuable SLU’s (Small Logic Units) are identified. SLU’s are then developed in parallel to one another, enabling a fast and constant stream of deliverables. When it comes to attended automation, this means that new automated processes can be rapidly built, and business-users can start using chunks of the functionality in practice.
As they do so, they can give feedback to the agile team, who can then refine and optimize the automated process to improve performance and the overall user experience. Several SLU’s and process elements can be developed in parallel by following this methodology. This makes for a collaborative and efficient partnership between business users and the agile team.
By the time a fully developed attended automation is deployed, users will be ready for it and adoption will be simpler because the people who will use and benefit from the process automation will have given their feedback throughout the development process. Let’s sum up a few more advantages of embracing agile methodologies for building attended automations:
1. Flexibility: Working with elements of an end to end business process makes it easier to accommodate unexpected change requests.
2. More efficient debugging: Because debugging efforts are focused on smaller sub processes, troubleshooting and bug fixing is much less painful and time-consuming.
3. Faster turnaround: It takes two to three weeks to experience and review each SLU and roughly two and a half months to review a demo of the full process.
4. Better quality: The focused attention on each process segment – paired with efficient error detection and correction plus constant user feedback – improves the quality of the final process automation and deployment.
5. Customer value: Business-users can see rapid progress in the development process and can start using each automated SLU once completed and published. In parallel, as the end user is experiencing each automated SLU, in practice, the development team can start working on the next deliverable.
Adopting a flexible mindset for scaling and continuous improvement
To be successful when using agile for developing attended automations, organizations need to have a flexible mindset with the sole purpose of achieving true collaboration. They should not create an upfront effort estimation, as they do when using a waterfall development methodology. Instead, by starting the development value realization will soon follow and the project scope and effort estimate will start to take shape.
To scale their attended automation footprint, enterprises can use Intelligent tools such as NICE’s Automation Finder. Automation Finder extracts and analyses millions of employee desktop actions to determine the best processes to automate. This works well with agile, since the Automation Finder presents the specific SLUs to the business analyst, which can in turn be handled by the agile team.
As a set of values and principles for building attended automations, agile helps to reduce risks, improve speed to production, enhance flexibility and ensure a good user experience with, and high adoption of the technology post deployment. Automation development teams that have not yet adopted agile for attended and other automations should start investigating how it could benefit their automation programs – many that try it never look back.