Governance
Robotic Operations Center
Release and Deploy
As long as nothing is live, you can get away with deploying directly to production, a missed bug can probably be solved quickly and all Is ok. The more goes live the more the need grows to structure this process, the new automation going live might impact another one that already is live, or that quick fix you added, might not be as well tested as it should have been because ‘it fixes another bug’. Many justifications get brought up for releasing straight to production.
Operate
As developing new automations is the most fun and generates ROI, it usually gets the most focus. But at some point, when the first few automations are live, you will find yourself or your employees starting every day by looking at the robots and see if they did what they were supposed to. Maybe helping tasks or bots that got stuck, and sometimes developers end up looking at the bots work all day instead of delivering new value.
Monitor
Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher already said once, ‘change is the only constant in life’. Systems get decommissioned, new systems added, especially in the SaaS and cloud-era automating a system can be quite a moving target. Once an automation goes live probably within weeks the first change might need to be done. Keeping an eye out for change and planning it, by talking to the system owners that we automate helps prevent down time in the future as well as reflecting, having retrospectives and lessons learned meetings help keep everyone on their toes.
