Change catalysts that advocate and drive adoption by sharing success stories and helping others discover the potential for automation across teams and the organization.

Overview

Enterprise automation can provide organizational agility, but changing execution strategy or creating learning-ready organizations will need to manage employee resistance to change. Employees tend instinctively to oppose change initiatives because they disrupt established ways of getting things done.

Automation initiatives come with people-related risks and challenges, business area stakeholders may:

• Feel overwhelmed with the vast amount of information and unclear about where to begin
• Ignore, stall or resist automating their processes
• Not define business requirements properly due to a lack of understanding
• Feel “out of their depths” technically due to the technical nature of automation
• Change business rules and processes that impact automation deployment

Adoption of automation doesn’t happen by itself. You need someone to drive it forward. Champions are change catalysts that advocate for and drive automation adoption within their teams. They use their success stories to try and show the value, then act as mentors and guides, with the experience that they gained implementing automation, to influence others. 

One of the ways champions can drive automation adoption is by letting people know how automation can solve their business problems. The data does not always speak for itself and you’ve got to think about how to wrap your data in the right story to help your employees understand and believe in automation. Automation stories help bring your automation ideas/initiatives to life and can influence employees in a positive way so they go and spread the word. Success stories show the real benefits and value that the business has experienced. Refer to our “Success Stories” guide on how you can create success stories that resonate with your employees.

To identify a suitable champion, it is essential that you identify early adopters and find the right people who can become your strategic partners in driving adoption. Those that have implemented automation and now see the value that automation can bring to your business, are good candidates. Automation has this great ability to directly address business needs in a way that organically creates champions. You can refer to the “Automation Champions” guide to learn more about how to identify and develop internal champions.

Leveraging automation champions to act as role models can help you:

• Have distinct automation proponents to drive organic advocacy within business areas
• Bridge the technical and information gaps between technical and business functions/teams by having business experts partner with technical experts
• Have Subject Matter Experts who know their business processes involved in prototyping and building to enable automation services valuable to the business
• Avoid and resolve communication breakdown and misunderstanding issues by setting and managing team expectations around automation
• Unlock automation delivery capacity by coaching and mentoring team members (including citizen developers) to build automations
• Smooth resistance to change, raise and address people-related risks and barriers to adoption
   

GEARS Assets