Automation can drive huge impact for professionals and business of all sizes. On the last posts in this series, the importance of Automation was highlighted and showcased with a case study. Today, we will place the emphasis on the impact. Understanding the influence that Automation will have in your work is of paramount importance to decide whether to invest on it or not.
During my time in OpenIEBS, I had the challenging task of increasing the portfolio of available courses with minimal investment. Very early, I learned that this was not as easy as it seemed. In general, the limitation of having limited capacity made me explore all the different processes and teams of the company looking for bottlenecks which prevented the new platform to get the resources needed to grow. This is how Automation helped us improve quality and create a new revenue stream for the company.
Since I first watched Matt Cutts’ video on “30 day challenges”, I have been doing a few of them myself. This practice has added a good range of new interesting experiences to my life (but this is a topic for another article). As September started, I was looking for a new challenge. I decided to try to 30 days with with “no phone”.
I still remember my first day at Google over 3 years ago. As I was shadowing one of my colleagues, I spent over 10 minutes painfully watching them manually copying and cleaning data around several web applications. You could easily estimate that this manual repetitive process was wasting 50 hours a week to the company. In other words, they would not have needed to hire me if this process had been automated or better designed. It took me a bit more of 2 hours to create a small Javascript file that would add a <copy> button to the interface that would export the whole view in the format the team needed and share it with them. And, just like that, we brought back 5 hours to each team member every week and saved one full time employee to the company.