Why you need to ‘sell’ RPA and Intelligent Automation to your business, and how to keep the right kind of attention needed to succeed

Why you need to ‘sell’ RPA and Intelligent Automation to your business, and how to keep the right kind of attention needed to succeed – Part 4 of 4

Having completed a successful proof of concept and obtained the funding you need to grow it is time to scale your communications management program.

Now you are up and running, accelerate forwards:

When an automation program is up and running, like a ragging fire, it needs fuel and oxygen to survive. Having promoted and advertised the initial stages of the automation program, it is time to double down, when it is up and running. Success breeds success but no one will know what is being achieved if you don’t constantly keep them informed.

It is critical to repeat and reuse some of the lessons from the POC (e.g. robot naming competitions, lunch and learns, build a bot competition and video etc.) every time the automation program moves to a new business area.

However, there are a range of additional ‘fuel’ types you can place on the fire to drive further awareness, interest and support.

Make your COE leader accountable for evangelising RPA / IA at executive level and indeed every opportunity available.
Advertise internally for people to learn how to spot processes ripe for automation and link this to your lean and Six Sigma training and teams.
Ask your vendor for heatmaps which highlight proven automation hotspots and go have conversations with leaders in those areas.
Hackathons – short, energetic community events in which diverse groups of people team up to quickly experiment and prototype ideas of solutions that they feel will benefit the community
Gamification – reward ideas and outcomes with prizes.
Go chat to the organisations training, lean or continuous improvement teams, educate them on process identification and provide them with opportunities to drive process improvement.

“If you want, kick it off by asking business people ‘what systems do you use to sell, deliver and invoice your customers?’ Because everyone knows what systems they have. A lot of people have no clue about what processes they perform. Asking them about repetitive processes has a tendency to either fall flat on the ground or get you the wrong opportunities. But ask them what they log into and you open a common ground with your recipient. And common grounds are worth their weight in gold, as they are your shortcut to understanding, winning trust and then introducing solutions.
Lasse Rindom, Chief Digital Officer

Chat to the risk team. Where business units are failing – repeatable, standard automation checks may present an opportunity for bots to complete that work instead.
Chat to your finance department and see what processes are causing the organisation financial pain (e.g. you maybe able to insource work by creating an RBPO) or where there is opportunity to create value but only at lower digital worker cost. Chatting with procurement may also identify areas of opportunity for automation before money is spent on new IT solutions.
Skills workshops – traditional, localised, and small-scale workshops to engage workers and elicit ideas for RPA-enabled work improvements.
Develop training courses or a virtual learning academy, with the assistance of vendors or partners, to help workers (developers and citizen developers) get started.
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Create a Citizen Developer program and give a robot to everyone who is competent to use them. But remember to give them the training, mentoring, time and coaching they need to be able to perform as well.
Remember to focus on how they could scale participation and engagement in every aspect of the RPA program — not just bot development e.g. opportunity identification, process mapping, media and communications etc.’
Assign your organisation’s very best people to the automaton program. The future of work is digital. It is robots and humans. Every leader in the organisation must recognise this and promote this.
Celebrate and communicate success at every single available opportunity (e.g. in emails, newsletters, on internal automation websites, at townhalls, etc.
Announce monthly and annual automation prizes e.g. best business outcome, best automation idea, etc.
Create an internal automation website that evangelizes automation, explains key terms, evidences examples of success and clearly shows who to chat to, or what to do, in order to submit ideas for automation.
Video everything. Vlog and blog at every opportunity to retain interest. Post the content on the internal automation website and/or benefitting department websites.
Adjust HR hiring criteria to ensure automation and digitisation was actively considered before a role was offshored or right shored or hired.
Create Computer Based Training (CBT) that is compulsory for all staff.
Adjust executive, leader, manager and staff KPIs to include a substantial reward for automation.

“Make automation a part of everyone’s performance objectives to raise at least 1-3 good Automation ideas that qualify. Then you have incredible buy in. What you need though, is to equip people with how to capture their processes properly as well as a portal for those ideas to be tracked and managed in a central place.

On top of that you can reward people with points and every so often give out prizes for people that get the most points. Then as Automation ideas start getting put into production you can manage that all in 1 clear view of human and bots working on the same processes”.
Danilo McGarry Head of Automation and Internationally Recognised Expert

Automation is a journey and not a destination. Automation and digitisation takes a lot of time, effort and money to get right. But this is a worthwhile journey. Getting investment to buy an RPA tool which can act as the catalyst for your digital journey requires money, buy in from your executive, ICT and business teams. This buy-in needs won every day, not just when you start your project.

“Digital solutions are actually not that difficult to sell, but it depends where you are pitching from. Let us make that clear. If you are pitching from a position of trust and have delivered several very successful projects in the past, well – you’re home safe. If you are pitching software from canvas at a company you have little insights into, you’re up against it.
Lasse Rindom, Chief Digital Officer

There is a daily battle for business resources. You need to communicate how your digital and automation program is, and will continue to deliver successful business outcomes just to earn the right to stay in the game. Remember the best way to be successful, is to be successful. When you have something to talk about that clearly delivers against an organisations objectives, you are set for success.

What ways would you recommend to sell RPA and Intelligent Automation within your organisation?

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Why you need to ‘sell’ RPA and Intelligent Automation to your business, and how to keep the right kind of attention needed to succeed – Part 4 of 4