Assess and prioritize automation requests to business outcomes for greater business value realization.

Overview

Companies are adopting more SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications as they continue to invest in their digital transformation initiatives to discover business insights, improve user experience, increase revenue, or other business objectives. 

Increased focus on hyperspecialization is creating more silos where employees are required to interact with more systems and tools. Today, businesses are looking to build more automations to address this growing demand from internal and external customers by streamlining these interactions between systems and users to achieve operational excellence. However, as the opportunities for automation are growing every day with newer technologies, so too are backlogs for delivery teams. 

The lack of intake and prioritization process can lead to many challenges irrespective of your choice of the technology platform used by different groups for building automations. 

• Ad-hoc project selection can lead to delayed time to value due to a lack of alignment between different initiatives to the business objectives. For example, suppose the delivery team implements projects as they receive various requests from the business. In that case, the team may be occupied working on a lower value project while a high business impact initiative awaits resources to be made available.
• It leads to an inadequate collaboration between business stakeholders and delivery teams without a common understanding of which projects are essential to achieve business goals.
• The success of initiatives cannot be measured effectively to map them to various business outcomes if teams do not align projects to business objectives upfront.
• Lack of visibility into the status of different projects, duplication of work or rework due to overlapping initiatives, and inefficient utilization of resources.

These challenges apply whether you have a central team for building all automations across the organization or if you have structured your teams to take advantage of a distributed delivery model with each group building their separate automations. But with a central team delivery model, having a common backlog becomes even more important for better visibility and effective utilization of limited resources.

The intake and prioritization allow you to overcome these challenges by providing a well-defined process for discovering, assessing, and mapping the business objectives of different automation requests and then prioritizing those requests to deliver the highest business value.

As the name suggests, intake and prioritization involve two parts. First, an intake process for stakeholders to submit new project requests, automation ideas, and improvement suggestions. A clearly defined template for requesting a new project will ensure that requesters provide all the required information to evaluate the request priority and then implement it. This process eliminates back and forth between different stakeholders and streamlines collaboration. Some organizations also require that requesters associate the high-level business objective or strategic goals while requesting new automations, improving the strategic alignment of various initiatives. 

The second part is the prioritization of automation requests. Once the delivery team has the necessary information, they can easily route them through a funnel to identify each request's complexity and business value. This process allows them to organize and update their backlog to work on the highest business impact requests and lower implementation costs at any given time. Such a centralized and prioritized backlog also creates cross-functional visibility where all stakeholders and business teams know the status of their requests, further improving the collaboration and information flow between groups, which is foundational to achieving business agility.

Finally, it requires clearly established roles and responsibilities of all the stakeholders. You should identify which users can submit new requests, sponsor the initiative, review and approve the project proposal, and implement the automation once the request is approved.

Typically, a central governance team such as the Automation HQ team is responsible for handling the prioritization process and resource allocation to approved requests. However, in a fully distributed model, respective Automation Factory teams can manage their backlogs by selecting the prioritization metrics and assign resources according to their business needs. Thus, a distributed execution model provides greater agility since multiple business teams no longer compete for limited resources to get their work done.

As business needs change, you will need to reassess your intake and prioritization process to ensure your teams consistently deliver value. Hence, a well-defined process should be combined with proper tools and templates to maximize its impact. 

Start by defining an automated request intake and approval workflow to standardize how new automations are requested. Then document and communicate the prioritization process so that everyone has a shared understanding and the metrics for defining value.

Resources

GEARS Assets