4 ways to talk to your manager about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

There’s no denying that Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has had your back when you needed it most. It reduced your frustrations, time and steps needed to finish your day-to-day tasks right, the first time. 

Although it’s easy for you to see the benefits automation has made for your daily work items, what if it could be extended to the rest of your team or adjacent teams? We know it might be difficult for you to show others (decision makers or management) how your team could start automating at the same rate that you are. 

Here’s where your automation opportunity presents itself; if you are able to effectively pitch the need for automation at a higher level to your IT leadership team (and in the same language they expect) they will be more receptive to your calls for help. 

Ultimately, you’ll need to provide how you increased productivity and reduced costs, all while demonstrating your expertise as a technology influencer. The result? You will become viewed as an innovator who leads the charge on improving your organization’s operational effectiveness, and in the end you may just get promoted or given more high value responsibilities. 

Here are some practical tips for how to effectively talk to your manager about Ansible Automation Platform so everyone walks away feeling like it was a “win-win” situation.

1. More time to value

One of the core benefits of automation is reducing time-consuming, manual tasks for individuals. Eliminating those pesky recurring (and sometimes menial) tasks with automation saves precious time and money that could be spent in places that are more impactful to the business. Here’s some examples of what you can say to managers to help them see the benefit of expanding automation across your organization.

• “We need to reduce the number of automation point-tools, while standardizing on Ansible Automation Platform.”
• “Ansible Automation Platform can automate across the organization, not just our team. Our team can be the change agents you need for our modernization efforts.”
• “Buying Ansible Automation Platform takes the guesswork out of all those open source projects. It’s all included in a single package just like other Red Hat products.”

Opening up the conversation with these points helps to introduce the many benefits of adopting Ansible Automation Platform. You can back up these claims  with the hard facts: Ansible Automation Platform provides critical bug fixes and security vulnerability backporting for all included components while also including 18-months enterprise support per release.

You also receive an extensive knowledge base, security hardening and configuration guides, and a globally-based support team that is just a call or click away.

All this considered, this can greatly reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks and upkeep so your team is free to focus more on business critical innovation.

2. Mitigate risks

A key concern for most IT leaders, and possibly yourself, is security and risk management. When considering the best automation solution for your team, think of compliance, remediation, and efficient ways to enhance security and how Ansible Automation Platform addresses them:

• “Ansible Automation Platform is a tested and trusted automation product built for enterprises and backed by Red Hat.”
• “When relying on community or open source tools alone, it can lead to increased operational problem solving that results in downtime.”
• “In the end, whose responsibility is it on your team to maintain security compliance and standards? This technical debt can be handled in-house, but for the entire team it can be much harder to maintain stable operations without expert guidance.”

You can follow these points up with Red Hat’s dedicated product security team that monitors, identifies, and addresses vulnerabilities quickly. Red Hat helps organizations manage their risks for open source software with security patches (that Red Hat has created, tested, and delivered) for all versions of Red Hat’s entire portfolio in their supported life cycles (including backported fixes).  

Red Hat also invests in strict engineering requirements to certify products to meet stringent government and commercial security standards (such as Common Criteria and FIPS 140-2).

3. “Show them the money”

Being the expert is great, but if none of your bosses know what or how automation is making you and your team more productive, you may not have any influence or “aircover” protection from them. If people gained a deeper understanding, your team could function with more resilience, capacity and security to your automation strategy that unites teams.

• “I’ve been able to automate these a, b, c tasks and it saved me roughly this number of hours. And with these savings I’ve been able to work on these x, y, z initiatives to move the business forward.” 
• “I’ve been able to automate to reduce the risk of outages, errors or failures in our IT estate.”
• “I’ve been able to integrate Ansible Automation Platform with other business-critical systems (like ServiceNow, Dynatrace, etc.) in order to connect different teams together with a common automation framework.”

After laying out how you used automation to save time and money, this is where you can bring in Ansible Automation Platform’s specially packaged features like automation mesh which you can add to your automation fabric across the IT infrastructure and multiple sites (Data Centers, Availability Zones, etc.). Ansible Automation Platform takes multiple upstream projects and bundles them into an easy turn-key solution with certified content and integrations only offered with Ansible Automation Platform.

So yes, you are the hero that can do these amazing things with automation and now you can show the potential of the entire team using features like automation mesh to help reach your goals even faster.

4. Be fit for the future

Automation is increasingly tied to larger business goals, making it a high-visibility, high-impact opportunity for folks like you who are looking to become a subject matter expert in their field. This is a great way to reinforce building automation into a long-term IT strategy.

• “Ansible has helped me do my job this much already on my own. Imagine if everyone was using Ansible Automation Platform in our organization? We could use Red Hat’s ability to help in operationalizing the creation of and administration of all these Ansible Playbooks while keeping security as a focus.”
• “We’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do in our organization. We can automate Linux servers, Windows servers, networking devices (switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers), clouds (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), and much more. 
• “We already have so much technical debt because of all the silos in our organization. What happens when we try to modernize? How will different teams be able to successfully collaborate in the future?”

Enhancing your automation with Ansible Automation Platform doesn’t prevent people from contributing to upstream projects, it could actually improve their experience. Ansible Automation Platform benefits from contributions of the community by hardening solutions created there into tangible, enterprise solutions that your team can influence by being involved in both.

Ansible Automation Platform provides the ultimate “multiplier effect” for all your IT teams for today, while providing what’s needed tomorrow.

More resources:

• Looking to migrate from patchwork to platform automation? Learn more here!
• Explore hand-on Ansible Automation Platform labs
• Compare your Ansible options and learn how Ansible Automation Platform differs from upstream Ansible projects
• Watch this video to learn more about migrating to Ansible Automation Platform  and subscribe to the Ansible YouTube channel for the best automation tips and tricks