"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" is a well-known quote by management consultant Peter Drucker. Strategy is the way to achieve your goals, but the fundamental culture must be there as a basis for this. This can also be applied to automation: Automation is the means to an end, but there must be a fundamental readiness for change in your company. Automating without following a plan does not bring sustainable success. Projects can only be successful in the long term if your company has a suitable, well-founded culture for innovation and automation. Let's have a look on the four strategies that help you implement automation successfully in your company and team with competence building in automation.
Four Strategies For Competence Building in Automation
According to a study by the Research Institute for Social Development, openness and the ability to learn are the most important prerequisites for the "Working World 4.0. We present four strategies that will help you establish a basic learning culture in your company and competence building in automation:
1. Openness
In general, a good learning culture must prevail in the company. Employees should have the freedom to develop and discover new topics. Ideas from the team (bottom up) should be taken up and quickly implemented by management (top down).
2. Professional Change Management
To automate changes business processes. It's not just about new tactical plans, but above all about people and desired behavioral changes. Those responsible should prepare their team for change early and continuously and create a professional change management approach. In concrete terms, this means:
- Reach out to individuals and ask them for ideas, goals and concerns (stakeholder analysis)
- Involve all levels and plan how operations will change specifically (change impact analysis)
- Create accountability and clear responsibilities
- Communicate transparently, address values explicitly and address concerns
The most important thing: Prepare for the unexpected. Change doesn't always go as planned. A strategy is important, but a company's culture should also be able to absorb unexpected twists and turns.
3. Holistic Approach To Competence Building in Automation
Educate yourself further in the top academies of various software providers, such as UiPath or Celonis, or independent providers like Bots & People or Udemy. There are courses for all levels of knowledge, from introductions to automation, to Python, to web development. What also helps: Simply implement your own first projects.
If automation is to be set up in a strategically sound manner, it is important to undergo holistic further training, for example to become an Automation Strategist. There are several reasons for this: Automation is thought of holistically and across technologies. For example, a project can be automated not only with RPA, but also via interfaces or with iPaaS solutions. Companies also protect themselves from becoming dependent on a specific consultancy and its used technology. Automation Strategists should have a dedicated role in the company and drive automation full time CENTRALLY. Automation Strategy is not a part-time job and not just in Finance.
4. Involve all employees
Integrating employees along the way and communicating transparently increases the chances of success for automation. It is also important to get the business departments on board that do not have anything to do with automation at first glance. Although the IT team helps with implementation, automation should benefit all areas. For example, employees from the HR department or accounting department should also be taught how they can use automation to their advantage.
Long-Term Success through Competence Building in Automation
Simply implementing projects without establishing a sound learning culture may lead to short-term successes, but automation remains only on the surface, as is currently the case in 95% of cases. Learning culture and competence building in automation are the cornerstones for process automation to be successfully established in companies. And so, in the end, a rather soft topic also raises the return on investment and makes management and employees happy!
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