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Part Two in a Series of Blog Posts About Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
This content is from a 2022 webinar produced and published by NICE that features iQor VP of Research and Analytics Ada Smith and iQor SVP of Digital Solutions and Optimization Joe Przybylowski. You can watch the full webinar, iQor Empowers Airline Agents to Boost Performance With Attended RPA, on demand. No name or email is required.
From Ada Smith’s Presentation
Over the years I have led many RPA projects for iQor and have developed several best practices. These are my keys to successful RPAs that achieve results with measurable ROI.
1. Consult All Levels
Talk to as many people as possible. In addition to spending time with the project requestors and managers, also meet and interview the people who do the manual work and are end users of the proposed RPA. Make it a part of the process to ask the same questions in different ways to a variety of people. This will help you come as close as possible to the right answer.
2. Disregard Traditional Notions of Scope
Even though we often begin with an idea of what an automation should be, it is important to see all of the processes in addition to the primary one.
People often say, “Oh, that doesn’t pertain to this project.” My response is that I need to see it anyways because RPA has many abilities and there may be potential solutions that haven’t been considered. We need to retrain our way of thinking to look beyond simple replacement. The goal is to optimize a process and we need to look at anything that might impact the design.
3. Establish Clear Roles
Throughout the project, remind everyone of their roles as you move through the different phases of discovery, design, development, and testing. It is important to set expectations for each person and explain their function in each phase. This will ensure you are correctly resourced and will help you stay on schedule.
4. Keep the Momentum Going
During long design and development cycles, morale and focus can slip in both the operations team and the development team. You can manage this on the technical side through defined sprints, clear milestones, and by avoiding large breaks between project steps. On the operations side, frequently communicating progress and positive news of milestones will affirm to team members that the project is moving along. 
5. Conduct Postmortems
Perform a full review of the project after every bot goes into production. Look at the original design notes, compare them to what was created, and assess whether what you envisioned from the beginning ended up as the production RPA or if you landed somewhere completely different.
This analysis informs future projects so you know what concepts work, how the development cycle progressed, and what may be done differently going forward.
6. Follow Up
Maintain communications with the stakeholders and users to keep up with process changes, system changes, and organizational changes that could impact production RPAs. Everyone has their own tasks to focus on, so you need to proactively ask for updates.
RPAs must be maintained, developed, and sometimes overhauled, depending on the needs of the business. Keep the lines of communication open and know that change management is a frequent aspect of automation.
7. Take Time for Maintenance
Ensure your materials are up to date. Confirm you have everything stored correctly, your templates are current, you have the latest company branding, and anything else that may apply. This improves efficiency, allows you to quickly generate new projects, and makes it easier to access information for presentations.
By applying these best practices, I am able to identify strong use cases, speed up design and production cycles, and produce value-added bots.
Bonus
Here’s one more point that was not part of the presentation, but is a best practice for all RPA projects.
Ensure Data Security
With all RPA projects, it’s important to keep data security top of mind. Implement robust security measures to protect sensitive data during RPA processes. Gartner points to four areas of RPA security that require attention:
- Ensure accountability for bot actions.
- Avoid abuse and fraud.
- Protect log integrity.
- Enable secure RPA development.
More on RPA
This blog post on RPA is the second in a series by Joe Przybylowski and Ada Smith. Check out Part One, The Benefits of RPA: How BPOs Help Organizations Save Time and Money With CX Automation.
Experience the Best in RPA
iQor is a business process outsourcing company (BPO) ideally suited to help brands optimize their business processes through RPA and digital transformation. Our intelligent automation delivers better customer experiences and helps employees perform at their best.
iQor’s cognitive RPA software solutions are customized to client needs. We use AI and machine learning to handle high-volume, repetitive, or slow, time-consuming tasks. With streamlined workflows using RPAs, our team completes tasks faster and more accurately to provide amazing customer experiences.
Moreover, our experience designing, developing, and implementing successful RPA projects for many different businesses enables iQor to identify and recommend the solutions that will deliver to each client their highest return.
If you’re ready to start a conversation with an RPA expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.
Ada Smith is vice president of research and analytics at iQor.
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