POINT OF VIEW
Introduction
Business Automation Workflow (BAW) is an automation tool that allows you to manage and orchestrate your process workflows. This means facilitating the flow of tasks, data, documents, and anything else that is required to ensure the right people and IT systems have the right information to complete their part of process.
The question is, how can you get the most value from your investment in automation workflow software? Enter Responsiv Consulting.
This Blueprint will outline how organisations will see value from their BAW and automation investments using Responsiv Consulting
Examples of the sort of problems BAW helps resolve:
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- Have you ever had to chase multiple teams to find out where an approval is stuck?
- Have you struggled to find out if a system has completed its processing?
- Have you engaged with customer helpdesks where they cannot be clear why your problem has not been resolved or what will happen next?
All these types of issues can be helped by BAW to manage these processes to achieve better outcomes for internal teams and customers.
What is Responsiv Consulting?
Responsiv Consulting provides strategic and tactical advice and guidance to organisations seeking to integrate and automate their data. We have skills and experience in business and technical consulting across industry – giving us knowledge and expertise that we apply to new environments.
Responsiv Consulting ensures organisations get the most out of their integration and automation software investments, designing and building bespoke solutions to fit the business need.
Responsiv Consulting can be engaged at any stage of your automation project. Whether you are building a business case, trying to define requirements, or looking to build from existing requirements, Responsiv Consulting has the skills and expertise to step in to facilitate the completion of your project.
BAW and Responsiv Consulting
So, how can we apply Responsiv Consulting to implementing and getting value from Business Automation Workflow?
Well defined process requirements are crucial to getting value from automation
The benefits of process automation come from well understood processes. Representing requirements in detail to communicate business need is the crucial first step to getting a return on your automation investment.
Implementing automation to poorly understood and undefined processes is asking for a drawn-out build and rework down the line as issues are guaranteed to arise.
Responsiv Consulting ask the ‘silly’ questions that get your processes defined. No activity or step is irrelevant – we want to hear it all. Producing a document that outlines the business process requirements prior to building out your automated process ensures we understand what it is that needs to be considered and addressed.
Discovery workshops not only inform us of your requirements but allows organisations to consider their own processes in ways they may not have before. It is the opportunity to optimise and make workflows more efficient even before anything is automated.
The value of documenting these requirements goes beyond just allowing the development of technological solutions, being useful for staff reference and onboarding new staff. Additionally, it ensures skills and experience is captured and not at risk of loss with departures.
Having a conclusive definition of the process and its requirements ensures there is no deviation from the agreed steps and activities, leading to more efficient and consistent completion of workflows.
Seeing Value
Value may be in the form of new insights or a return on investment (ROI). Responsiv Consulting provides value on both these fronts through understanding both the business and technical needs, and developing solutions to optimise and streamline said needs to solve a business problem.
Understanding the business and technical sides of a project – this is the value
Responsiv Consulting is more than technical people implementing what you have asked. We ensure that what is delivered aligns with your strategic objectives and delivers value.
Our business consultants ask the question ‘why are you doing that?’ to fully understand what it is the business is looking to get out of their technology initiative. This is then translated by our technical consultants who design and propose solutions based on the desired functionality and outcomes.
The key thing with any tool is that it is good for some things and not for others. Responsiv Consulting advise when to use certain tools, when to use others, and when multiple tools may be necessary to get the best results.
Our knowledge of IT architecture across technologies allows us to provide informed insight into how certain software tools will fit in and work together and the implications of what has been implemented. For example, we know that automation is not possible without integration, but this does not hinder our development.
Responsiv has skills in a host of technologies, allowing us to provide fully realised solutions, not just fractions of one. In this case, we can integrate your systems using APIs , files or driving an existing web or desktop UI, and set up the automation tool such as BAW or RPA.
Using what you have
Responsiv work with what you have already and assume this is a mixed environment of complex systems and applications.
This is where BAW comes into its own. Where businesses already have automation, we can augment it, and where they don’t, we can provide the backbone as well – orchestrating the whole estate.
Responsiv Consulting and BAW accelerate time to value from your existing IT and automation investments. You do not have to throw away and start from scratch, rather optimise through understanding, integrating, and efficient managing.
Use Case
This example use case will outline how Responsiv Consulting can be used to accelerate the value from BAW when automating a recruitment process. We developed this solution for a client to enhance the effectiveness of their current process and to work alongside existing IT systems that had roles to perform delivering a slick service.
As a business, you have identified the need to streamline your recruitment process as it is lengthy, and delays are causing candidates to find roles elsewhere.
However, this process has changed over the years, and there is no written record of the steps and tasks that lead to the completion of the workflow, each member of the recruitment team completes the process in different ways, meaning candidates have an inconsistent experience.
Responsiv is engaged to help define the recruitment process intending to automate and streamline the process for staff and candidates.
Responsiv Consulting will set up discovery workshops with key stakeholders to define the process from end-to-end. This will include designating the workflow’s start and end points – something that may seem obvious but is likely to change depending on who you ask.
For this example, the start is triggered by a candidate creating an application account and ends with them returning a signed offer. Defining these start and end points is crucial to ring fencing the scope of the process, bringing the focus to the tasks that will see the completion of the process.
Responsiv believe in the art of the possible – anything is possible to begin. Do not limit your expectations when defining what you want from your solution. Responsiv Consulting have the expertise to assess what is possible versus what is not and can provide alternatives where necessary.
If you want a singing dancing recruitment process that tracks all candidates, reports on ED&I data, stores applications in-line with data processing policies, communicates with candidates – assigning tests and interviews, etc. then tell us and we will say what is possible and what is not.
Once the stakeholders have provided what they know about the process and what they want from their solution, including how data and control is transferred through the stages, Responsiv Consultants will go away and create a business requirements document.
This document will outline use cases that define what is wanted from the solution. This document will cover the whole process, regardless of project scope, so to future-proof the solution by ensuring we understand the whole requirements and don’t create issues down the line.
The process of creating these requirements will involve stakeholders throughout, as more information and example data is likely to be needed.
Once these requirements have been agreed upon, design and development can begin. By having the requirements, technical consultants will understand which systems are involved with what data (including extracting data for ED&I reporting), at which stage, and what is necessary for a successful or unsuccessful recruitment outcome.
Working with internal IT skills where necessary, Responsiv will integrate systems and automate tasks (and/or trigger manual tasks) to ensure the workflow can complete as optimally as possible.
When the development is complete and the solution deployed, staff can monitor the progress of candidates through the dashboard, showing the status of all process instances (applications). Alert emails can be triggered to recruitment staff to notify them of new, dormant, rejected, and accepted applications, keeping them up to date on the progress of their process.
Now, with all stages clearly communicated, staff have a well-defined process to follow. Candidates will not face delays in hearing responses about their application progress due to the deployed solution.
Conclusion
Responsiv Consulting accelerates the time to value from your automation software by properly understanding your processes and business need.
We know that every organisation is different and there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, but this is exactly how Responsiv Consulting delivers value to customers. By engaging with stakeholders and the people doing the job, we understand your business process to the depth necessary to implement an automation solution.
You can find out more about BAW here:
To find out more about BAW and Responsiv Consulting, get in touch!
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