Establish processes to help teams implement automations consistently and collaboratively to improve quality and productivity.

Overview

As the number of automation projects grows, managing your automation's lifecycle becomes essential using well-defined processes. Whether you are implementing new business process automation, enhancing existing ones, or fixing issues in already live automation, the process of managing the change can generally involve several stages and multiple teams. To improve your chances of success while reducing disruptions to business services, you need a plan for implementing changes and operating live automations.

Automation Lifecycle Management is a series of steps that teams can follow, from discovering automation ideas to implementing and running them in production. By applying best practices, organizations can streamline their end-to-end automation delivery. A well-defined process can help create a seamless collaboration between teams vital to a cohesive organization working towards common objectives.

Apart from improving your production environment stability, having a separate, well-defined automation lifecycle process for development, testing, and production go-live have several other benefits:

• It helps develop high responsiveness to meet business demands by creating a scalable delivery model built for agility.
• Improve business resilience by ensuring that untested changes do not accidentally break live business services.
• Team efficiency improves due to a seamless handover of changes between developers, testers, and operations teams.
• Well-defined development practices provide freedom to experiment with innovative solutions and train team members in a production-like environment.

Even though change management processes may vary across organizations, you can apply different best practices to the following automation life cycle stages:

• Establishing a method for tracking automation change requests.
• Process for identifying and assessing the impact on shared assets and changes.
• Setting up necessary governance to enforce design standards, adherence to security guidelines, and ensure the quality of deliverables.
• Procedures for releasing and operating automation in production to reduce post-implementation incident spikes.

Once the automation lifecycle management processes are well-established, you should look to optimize the process to be able to enable more people to follow consistent practices to manage their automation projects. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or CI/CD is one such practice to deliver quality automations reliably and securely.  

The goal of CI/CD is to automate the way teams build, test, and release their automations. It helps automate the delivery to multiple environments such as test and production. Automating release processes makes it easier for teams to coordinate deployments, run quality controls on release, and reduce errors.

Additionally, automation lifecycle management should also measure the effectiveness of your change management processes to identify improvement areas over time. By capturing the critical milestones across projects, you can understand gaps in your operations. This will help you incrementally improve your overall automation delivery process by identifying opportunities for streamlining life cycle stages and reducing costs.

For example, you can begin to capture metrics such as the number of approved releases to the total number of releases requested. A higher percentage of rejected releases could imply that you need to fine-tune automation review or testing stages to improve the successful release ratio.

You can also start to capture additional metrics to further deep dive in specific areas such as:

• Number of rejected releases by a functional group to identify the training needs of a particular team, or
• A total number of incidents related to a given release for more effective quality control checks.

You can learn more about these best practices in the Automation Institute Recipe Lifecycle Management courses in the resources below.
 

Resources

GEARS Assets