RPA is still a relatively young industry. Best practices are starting to come to light, but we have a long way to go. At Automic, some of us come from a software development background, and from that viewpoint RPA feels a bit like where we were in the late 1990’s. Best practices, such as automated testing and versioned source control, were not standard practice as they are today.
Then, in 2000, Joel Spolsky, an early Microsoft engineer, published “12 Steps to Better Code” which outlined many of the best practices we now take for granted. At Automic, we think the RPA industry could use a similar list. So today we are publishing “12 Steps to Better RPA” and seeking feedback from the community.
Automic’s 12 Steps to Better RPA:
- Do you monitor your RPA process with a platform tool?
- Are your RPA logs stored in a centralized, searchable location (e.g. Splunk)?
- Is your escalation process integrated with your existing IT ticketing system?
- Are you using software to triage bot errors/failures?
- Do you have a process to assign IT support resources to outages?
- Do you have a process to communicate outages?
- Do all your bots have an SLA and it is monitored?
- Do you have an up to date BCP plan for your RPA?
- Do you have a documented process for any changes to automation?
- Are you tracking upgrades that may affect automation?
- Do you have development and testing environments that match production?
- Do you have a dashboard to report SLA, KPI’s and other metrics to stakeholders?
Have some feedback about this list, or want to get in touch with us to see how your own RPA process stacks up. Email us at hello@formulatedautomation.com
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