In my daily operations job as intelligent automation product owner, I have experienced several failures that made me question sometimes my whole career choice.
In the first example, the automation we built for our business team was very complex. I go to meet my business, as we scheduled periodical calls with this group, which was not in my city, but another European city.
Business does not show up, which I should have understood what that means, that moment, on the spot. But I did the mistake of keeping the flame of hope on. Big mistake.
I obviously went to their supervisor, asking why my business clients do not show up in the meetings we scheduled with them, for us to discuss the health of their automation. I was already thinking that my business does not show up because either 1) they are afraid of losing their jobs, 2) they simply despise us, the foreign aliens from the automation team or 3) they are just unprofessional.
Eventually, their supervisor “forced” these business contacts to behave nicely and show up in the meetings we set up for them.
While showing up in the stewardship and bot monitoring periodical meetings, my beloved business found some problems with their automation. The bot was not behaving according to their standards. The same standards that they set for the bot while in development, few months before. Second red flag I should have recorded, but I was not aware yet of what is going on.
Next thing we did for them was to put together a huge enhancement, to re-design the bots radically, giving them chances to fix the bots and make them more user-friendly and user-centered, just as they would like them to be. Complete failure.
My business was sabotaging all the efforts. We ended up in disaster. We spent huge amount of resources on this bot, and it all failed. We threw money on the window. Why?
Because this business was not motivated to use automation. They were so reckless, so careless, but at the same time only had the wit to sabotage the bots to get to the results they hoped: total failure of automation so that they can continue to do the process manually, so that they “prove” to themselves and their managers that they are “worth something”.
Overall, our company lost big time here. Why? As I explained in my previous post, lack of proper governance leads to these kinds of situations, where my automation team gets super frustrated. We all lost.
Without the people, and people can be motivated to automate only through a good governance, automation efforts fail.
The next example I will give is one in which we did not even reach the point in the previous example, it failed in testing phase. Business was so negative and emotional about the whole automation thing, but they forced themselves (or were forced by their managers, we’ll never know) to show up in meetings.
However, this business had other plan. To simply say the results of the bot are not ok, that is, pure sabotage in the testing phase. They either gave wrong data or kept lying that the test results are not ok. How do I know this? All of us in the developing team were wondering what is wrong because all results seemed ok, even by the standards the business gave initially. Plus, several months later when a new round of negotiations got in place, the bot was by miracle ready to be put in production in a few days.
Again, this business only wanted to see me and my team simply disappear. They kept lying that all test results are incorrect, and then went to their managers to complain that it is taking too much time from their precious time to give feedback to testing developer, so they would like to be left alone. Flabbergasted?
What could you tell them more? We left them in peace, thinking what did we do wrong. We did nothing wrong, they simply were against automation, were not motivated to use automation, they had the wrong mindset towards life and work, and the whole automation program did not have a proper governance to solve these deadlocks. And several months later, we went again to discuss.
In the corporation, conflicts of this nature are not solved in the courts, like in the nation-states, day-to-day lives of a citizen. There is not any court in the corporation, only the diktat of the manager. And the higher up the manager, most of the cases, the less they want to argue with their people and force them to give it another try to automate their process, and just prefer to listen to whatever their people tell them. Which most of the cases is they do not want to use the bot, and they invent some ridiculous reason which does not have any base in reality.
Managers prefer working with people than with bots, and this is a governance problem that needs to be solved in good intelligent automation programs, if a company is really serious about getting to the next level. Automation must be an all-in strategy, supported by a great governance and trainings of the people, however in reality the efforts are timid and governance does not really have coherence and proper structure. In the end, who wins is the one who shouts louder and has more influence on managers, and 99% of the cases in which business does not want to use bots, they end up doing the process manually. Simple as this.
The final example I will give is a personal one because I contributed massively to the development of that automation script. It was a very complex and key process in the corporation.
As the process was very complex, it had also a very unique design, and was failing a lot of times due to this frail design. But as much as we were thinking, we could not come up with a better design, so we needed to “swallow” the failures due to huge benefits we were reaping.
One day, the process changes and business decides not to use the bot anymore and go back to manual process. I was shocked. What were they thinking? My team is there to fix the bots, for free, and they chose not to. What was going on?
The business was so negative against bots, that they did not want the bot to be fixed. They wanted the bot to disappear. Why? Even until today, I do not find the answer. Most probably it was not doing what they were expecting. But then why didn’t they come to my team to find the right solution for them? How on earth is it possible to find economical reasons to throws tens of thousands of dollars on the window except malice and poor understanding of the situation.
Why does business prefer to do the process manually instead of automated will be a huge mystery that needs to be addressed by all of us in this industry. Why are they having the wrong attitude towards work and getting upskilled in general?
Automation should be a goal, but in reality, we see sometimes the opposite. This not only means huge losses for the corporation, because of causes that are not the scope of this article, but also self-sabotaging your own careers, because instead of upskilling and getting competitive so that you’re getting some nice raises in the future, you end up in the bottom, without marketable skills, at the mercy of management. Why do they self-sabotage is hard for me to understand.
Intelligent Automation Product Owner 