The Blueprint of a Successful Automation Ecosystem Revealed

Embark on a journey into the critical world of post-production support with Dan Andrews and Kieran Gilmurray.

With over thirty years of collective wisdom, we're here to dissect the 'three key pillars' of support essential for a resilient automation strategy.

We guarantee that by the end of our candid conversation, you'll have a lucid understanding of how a Robotic Operations Centre (ROC) can make or break the success of automation programs.

Whether you're a business owner looking to streamline operations or an automation enthusiast eager to deepen your knowledge, we've got insights that will optimize your ROI and prevent costly missteps.

This episode isn't merely a discussion; it's a masterclass where we break down the intricacies of RPA with a focus on tools like UiPath, and navigate through the maze of infrastructure options—from Azure and AWS to on-premises solutions.

As we unravel these components, we're not just sharing knowledge; we're inviting you to be a part of an evolving dialogue that could redefine how businesses approach automation.

Kieran and Dan address the challenges that companies face and the learning pathways for individuals keen on upholding the foundations of an automated infrastructure. So tune in, absorb, and let's push the boundaries of business process automation together.

Visit Virtual Operations (virtual-operations.com) for more information on intelligent automation, data analytics and AI or book a chat https://calendly.com/virtualoperations.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome to Automation Unscripted, an educational, frank and fun podcast dedicated to the art of business process automation. Automation Unscripted is brought to you by Virtual Operations, a leading consultancy in digital transformation with more than a decade's experience working with organizations to help them grow their return on investment in automation. In this edition, your hosts, Daniel Andrews and Kieran Gilmurry, are discussing how post-production support works in an automation programme, the role of the Robotic Operations Centre and some of the learning pathways for individuals looking to support an automated infrastructure.

Speaker 2: 0:44

the learning pathways for individuals looking to support an automated infrastructure. Welcome to our first virtual operations podcast where we're going to talk all things intelligent automation. Today, you'll be listening to both myself, Dan Andrews and Kieran Gilmoury talk about post-production support and the role an ROC, which stands for Robotic Operations Centre, plays. First, let's start with some brief intros. My name's Dan. I've been in the space for well over a decade now. For the last six years I've specialised in post-production support and I would hope that after that long period of time, I'd be fairly knowledgeable on the subject.

Speaker 3: 1:23

Hello, my name is Ciarán. I've been in the industry three decades, which is kind of scary when you think about it, but looking to share all of the knowledge that we've got, because I'm a firm believer in all boats rise on a floating tide. A bit like Dan, when it comes to automation, I've been working on this, as it's currently called, for the last 10 years, but realistically, there's been workflow automation and everything else before that for two decades, so let's bring our knowledge together to help you achieve great things, because we see too many people in the network I think it's fair to say Dan talking about things that they may not have the depth of knowledge on, and customers may spend large quantities of cash that they don't need to, and you and I both hate that.

Speaker 2: 2:05

Yeah, you put it well there saying bring our knowledge together, because that's one of the reasons we started this podcast. Kieran and I have been having these conversations for years now and they're incredibly beneficial to both me as an individual and VO as an organization conversation. So we thought why not share them with a wider audience and hopefully help educate some of our listeners and ourselves as we continue to dive into various topics over the coming weeks and months as opposed to saying we talked to each other for the last two years.

Speaker 3: 2:34

We've suffered together. Now we want the audience to suffer.

Speaker 2: 2:37

We're not saying that we're bringing value sometimes we suffer together if I don't understand the topic that we're talking about. I think a good place to start here is looking at support itself what actually is support? And then we can dive into a rock. So for me, I split it into three key pillars. The first one you have is product, and that's the tool utilized to automate the business processes. So this could be ai, ocr, rpa let's take rpa for now and use ui path as an example. The second pillar is process, so the business process that has been automated by, on that example, ui path as the tool. And and this is traditionally what people think of when they think of support the second pillar, which is process. And then there's a third pillar, which is platform, which is the infrastructure that everything runs on. So, depending on your organization and setup, this could be examples like Azure, aws, or it could be on-prem or in the cloud. Do you agree with that definition, kieran?

Speaker 3: 3:44

No, I really like that. It's the kind of three-legged stool that you and I have talked about lots of times. Dan, you know you need each working, working really well, otherwise something falls over. From your perspective, then, Dan, because you have been doing this support at the billion company level, as well as the hundreds of millions, as well as the millions and the hundreds of thousands. Are there any of those from your or a VOP's perspective that?

Speaker 2: 4:09

Yeah, I'm not going to say any of them aren't important.

Speaker 3: 4:14

Because that's what I will say. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 4:17

You take one down and it will always fall over. But for me, if I looked at, say, if I had just an example of 10 incidents historically, what I see is the majority will fall into the second two pillars, which is process and platform, and the first pillar, which is product. As important as it is. We may receive only one out of 10 incidents as anything to do with the product, which is great news for the likes of UiPath and Blue Prism, but it's still very vital to have those relationships with the product.

Speaker 3: 4:47

Dan. How did a ROC come about? Why is it important? What does a ROC even stand for?

Speaker 2: 4:55

a rock come about. Why is it important? What does the rock even stand for for me? Uh, a rock came about. It usually comes about as organization scales within the coa, so it's a function that sits aside as part of the coa. But it comes for two reasons it comes at scale and it comes because of skill set. So the first one scale scale around 15, 20 processes. You need a full team in order to keep those processes live and operating. You need a dedicated team. And that comes into the second point, which is skill set. The skill set within a ROC can vary quite differently from that of within the COE and it usually, at that type of scale, is not a small team either.

Speaker 3: 5:32

So having a dedicated team to focus on that production, those production live processes, is why a rock is so vital interesting, and do you remember back in the day, people didn't have a coe, and that's a reason why ventures automation ventures failed. Now, as you're describing it, the rock's a key component to keep alive processes and make sure they actually execute on the value. So how is a rock actually structured then? How are the teams and the roles in there laid out?

Speaker 2: 6:06

yeah. So I guess I like splitting everything into three. I'm not going to call these pillars, but let's go with. Let's go with three levels. So standard levels for me would be l1, l2, l3. Now there are lots of variations of this depending on your organization that you're setting up a rock for, but I'll go with the most basic one, which is l1 would be a mixture of tooling and a 24 7 offshore, onshore, whatever that might look like. L2 would be experienced management, both technical and non-technical, with developers and maybe a platform team in there, depending on how that's set up. And then L3 is the service lead or lead. So that is the orchestrator of the ROC, and for me this is an individual, because all rocks are set up different. This is an individual who can go into any organization and they can assess the landscape and they can decide where the need is for the client in order to gain the production process success that they are looking for, and that's the main skill set of L3.

Speaker 3: 7:17

Why do you deem a rock so important? Because you've done this at the $100 million and a couple of billion dollar level. But, in essence, why is a rock there? What's its most key function?

Speaker 2: 7:30

It goes back to what we said before. Right, if you have an automation program as a company to realize that value, you need to keep your processes live and you need to keep them running to realize that value. If you don't have a team dedicated to that, it's very likely that all those things fall at the wayside and then all the processes that are coming in are not meaningless, but the whole automation program is now at risk because you're not getting that value you said you would. Your stakeholders are now unhappy, thinking why are we adding more processes in when the ones we've got running aren't even realizing the value? So I think they're really crucial to the whole program. A rock is essential towards that and it was real difficult to actually get organizations to understand that about a decade ago. It was really just seen as an additional cost and not a necessity.

Speaker 3: 8:22

But I think, as organizations are now a reasonable scale and a lot of them everyone is, or most organizations are realizing how important this function is, yeah, I kind of like that because back in the day we didn't realize how important the COE is, and this is the actual extension in my head of a very stable platform and skill set to get people moving and realizing value from automation which is the absolutely key component three that actually sounds like there's quite interesting career paths for those who work in the rock.

Speaker 3: 9:00

It's not a case of just throwing code across the fence, but you were talking about l1 skill sets. You were talking about infrastructure and environment and some big scale support centers. What are the development pathways for people in a rock?

Speaker 2: 9:13

yeah. So I think at the same issue as before for me. When I put out a job post, I try and avoid words like support, because people don't really understand the extent of how involved you get in the automation program. If you are part of a rock, support control tower, whatever we're calling it people and I've seen this in multiple members of my team once people actually join the rock and start getting involved, you realize how many parts of the process life cycle that you touch. You gain a huge amount of knowledge.

Speaker 2: 9:44

You look at best practices, you look at process logging levels. You look at consistent error messages to why processes are breaking. You develop relationship with stakeholders, developers like it does encapsulate everything and sometimes, to, I guess, my detriment. With the team, you get to realize what area of an automation program you enjoy and I've lost many individuals who decide to go out and explore those areas in more depth. Right, but that does show the opportunities that are there. You get involved in so many different aspects as part of the rock and you really develop a knowledge of the industry, um, and how an automation program works. So I think it's great for someone developing or who who's already developed and want to go into that management or lead role I love that.

Speaker 3: 10:33

It's really interesting, isn't it? Because back in the day, the support role wasn't the one that you wanted to go into, because the front end kind of threw code over, made a mess of it and went I've done my creative part. What about AI within a rock, dan? Because we're hearing about artificial intelligence everywhere. Is it accountable for AI, or is that COE or somewhere else?

Speaker 2: 10:54

A hundred percent. And that's back to where I said learning pathways for individuals. That's something my team finds extremely interesting. We've utilized over the last three or four years a bunch of different monitoring tools that involve AI not just for monitoring, that's for monitoring process investigation and there's a load of them out there. Yeah, I think you could spend months delving into each individual tool and that's one of the things that's interesting about the team or the team's learning pathways. But we really have started utilizing AI and those monitoring tools a lot over the past three or four years and they're incredibly important. I look at L1, I said there's a mixture of 24-7 team and tooling. It used to be the case that if you wanted to monitor processes 24-7, you used to have to just throw individuals at it consistently as you scale. But when the monitoring tools came into place, it meant that now you can have an individual team maybe managing 50 to 100 processes that they're monitoring instead of, say, 20 or 25. So we're seeing the realization of those benefits.

Speaker 3: 11:56

Dan, that sounds like a topic we should have for our next podcast.

Speaker 2: 12:01

Perfect, that's exactly what we'll talk about. Let's go over quickly what we summarized today and then we're going to be talking about next week. So we talked about defining support, what it is, and then what is a ROC Robotic Operations Center, why a ROC is, important roles within a ROC, and then some of those learning pathways for individuals who might want to join a team, like the one we discussed. And then next week we're going to be discussing ai and rpa. There's a lot of buzz at the moment about ai, and there has been for the last two or so years, so we're going to be delving into case studies where the two actually work in parallel rather than being siloed as part of a process. Fantastic, I can't wait for that one. Thanks for listening today, everyone, and we will catch you next week. See you next week.