Automation Best Practices

I often get asked for a set of software automation best practices. What are best practices? Often they are just someone’s opinions on how to use a product or type of product in an industry. So, with more than 20 years of experience with the Robot Products, here are my 12 automation best practices:

1. Manage by exception. You don’t need to manage routine things.
2. Always automate. If you are manually performing a process daily or weekly, figure out how to automate it.
3. Start with your Run Book. The operator’s procedures are filled with opportunities for automation.
4. Automate at the source. Automation rules are better if they can be applied on each operating system.
5. Manage your automation rules centrally. Create new rules from a central console (host system) and send them out to the other systems.
6. Make someone accountable. Someone should own your automation. (You may need to change their title or job description)
7. Automation is a project. Automating computer systems is a full-blown project and you need to treat it that way.
8. If it’s too complicated, break it down. Over the years, I've heard that “Our issue is too big, too complicated, too important, to automate.” Nonsense—we’ve automated every process, even the most complicated.
9. Trust your automation. Let the software do the work and use automation rules to monitor.
10. Automate to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Use automation rules to make sure you meet your SLAs.
11. Stay well-trained. You can’t automate without trained staff.
12. Phase it in. Phase in your automation rules daily and weekly. You’ll be amazed at the progress you’ll make. Don’t try to do it all at once—you’ll probably fail.

Those are my 12 automation best practices. In the next blog, I’ll apply them to the Robot products.