4 ways to prepare teams to be an automation-first organization

Becoming an automation-first organization can be accelerated by starting with people. While technology and process are integral parts of any transformation, a strategy to manage organizational culture change can move you toward your business goals faster. Here are four ways to help accelerate your automation efforts.

Sharing early successes is critical to broader, standardized automation and orchestration efforts. Finding the right, first use case to automate is an important step. Some of the most visible workflows may also be some of the most complicated, and may not be an ideal example of early success. 

But the process can be made easier by identifying the costs of the more manual tasks or workflows you want to automate, then selecting one that has a complexity you can tackle, while also having a clear business value in automating (try our calculator). By determining the cost before you start automating, you can more easily calculate your return on investment (ROI) and show faster time to value that will give you the basis for persuasive, data-driven conversations with other departments later. Having the ROI of automation initiatives in hand can help unite teams faster by strengthening the case for broader enterprise automation, while also helping you showcase your own success.

Change can create anxiety in employees, especially if they feel their job security is threatened by a new process. But training your current team is faster than replacing via hiring or through long-term outsourcing. At the same time, your staff may not see the upside of these new, unfamiliar skills, or worry about exposing their own knowledge gaps. Proper training can make teams feel included in the change and prepare them for success.

Frame the change as directly benefiting the team. Show systems operators how new skills increase their effectiveness as they become infrastructure developers. Show mid-level managers the business value of agile processes that increase effectiveness, flexibility, and visibility while reducing the need for constant, rigid oversight. This approach can help allay fear of change, and make your employees feel empowered by the opportunity rather than threatened by it.

While you want to find a use case that will demonstrate a clear ROI on your automation efforts, you don’t want one that is overly complicated. If you select a use case that sits within the domain of a single team, you avoid early complications by automating processes and workflows over which they have complete control. This initial team can become automation and subject matter experts that can train other teams. 

The first use case should be automated with the aim of establishing standardization and governance for future use cases. Collaboration is necessary to foster an automation-first mentality, but it’s easier when there’s already a strong foundation of success. Having such a foundation to help unify the process can accelerate how quickly other teams adopt automation for their use cases.

Automation is more than just a box to check marking completion. An organization that reaches a maturity level in its automation practices where governance, orchestrations, and collaboration promote development-minded innovation and optimization is one that is built upon many increments and iterations. 

This approach doesn’t just define how individual use cases should be examined and automated—it applies to how you decide which use case to automate next, how to foster unity among teams, start your community of practice, and approach delivery of automation features. By understanding automation as a journey, you’re accepting that there is value not just in the end result, but in the process itself, which you’ll be able to use to create a stronger automation-first culture.