In the IT Industry, automation processes have a huge role to play. They don’t only massively help and cut-short gruelling manual hours of labour, but also adds precision and accuracy in almost all tasks.
But the true challenge is when it comes to actualizing the implementation of automated process. There are many pitfalls and loud challenges which all professionals who work dedicatedly while establishing this setup often face. As per a recent report published by Gartner, these major pitfalls have been clearly highlighted; explaining why is it mandatory for leaders to address these issues.
If you look with a wider perspective, you will come across 5 most common IT automation process pitfalls as examined by Gartner. Here is a summarised version of these challenges and ways to deal with them.
1. Shortage of IT Automation people and Skills
Most of the automation processes fail to produce satisfactory results because of lack of human resources handling these centralised issues. They either lack the appropriate knowledge or have no hands-on job experience to document, implement and govern the functioning. The key here is to finding expertise. Locating people who have appropriate experience and required level of skills, which are essentially needed for smoothly setting up an error free environment. Most organisations have decent number of skilled employees, who have the ability needed to work for and handle automation processes. Such employees, need to be given extra attention and they often need to constantly improve their skill set, in order to remain in tune with the growing advancements and changes.
Automation needs to be treated as an essential requirement and not as a side-functioning role. If more importance and criticality is awarded to automation, organisations will soon have more than satisfactory results. Another practice which can be modelled in such cases is having an automation manager, who would be responsible for governing the setup and finding out ways where automation can be useful and easily setup.
2. There is a Lack of Documentation for Existing Process
“Where do I start” is one of the biggest worries which professionals often face while planning to start or re-model documentation process. In most of the organisations, work patterns are random, which leave very less scope to have a streamlined documented process in place. Every user often customises the approach he or she has while working with automation setup. This leads to huge disparity when it comes to evaluating end results. The outcomes are often not consistent and have varying intentions. To counter this pitfall, it is imperative to follow this initial four step process as,
- Start now to document common process
- Provide a process documentation capability to capture and record initial process concepts
- Provide templates to establish common standards
- Ask automation manager to review the procedure and evaluate outcome
3. Cultural Resistance
Nobody readily accepts change. If your employees have been doing a certain task manually for a long duration, there will be some initial resistance from their end and their engagement levels would not be very high. Most technologists will also fear that they will lose their importance as they feed their codes in automation servers. Your employees will have many questions in their mind. You will have to work very patiently with them and answer all their concerns. If not, automation will not be successful and it will not yield requisite outcomes.
4. Lack of Standards and Process Expertise
If your employees have little or no understanding of a certain automation process, it is better to not implement it. The exact method for automation should be to work out a plan, run test cases, validate the outcome, and then proceed further. It just cannot simply run on hit and trial method. It is important to create key standards and well-documented process in order to achieve satisfactory results. It is important to evaluate metrics like stability and reliability versus flexibility and speed.
5. Loss of Focus and Traction
Most of the time, the reason behind having poor outcomes and less than satisfactory outcomes is poorly conceptualised strategies. Automation can be demanding and require attention to detail. If you lose interest or deviate from finding appropriate resources to dedicate long hours while setting up automation, there is a huge chance that our expectations will not be met. It is important to have a crystal clear objective while approaching any automation project. It can be easy to get lost in the complexity trap, but the golden rule here is to follow strict documentation process and adhere to infrastructure guidelines.
We hope this blog has helped you overcome some barriers and have a well set up automation process.
[Referred from 5 Most Common IT Automation Pitfalls]
