Organisations must re-prioritise their backlog of automations and concentrate on key person dependencies to mitigate Coronavirus impacts. Most organisations who are automating processes look to extract as much value as possible as early as possible. Makes sense. But many see “value” as a synonym of “cost efficiency” – how many hours will this save? There are many value other drivers for automation including compliance, accuracy and risk.
One specific risk is the key person dependency. Even very large organisations often have a small team responsible for critical tasks – perhaps even just one person responsible for a mission critical task. It’s not necessarily a big task but one that if not done, could bring parts of an operation to a standstill. Due to a key person dependency by definition not having many people doing it, it will not score highly on a process assessment that is weighted towards the “cost efficiency” value driver. So even if it is a highly automatable process, it wallows way down on the backlog.
Coronavirus is a virtually unprecedented threat to business. It’s not just the risk of people becoming ill but also the risk of large-scale quarantining and self-isolation. If one person in a small team becomes infected, the rest of that small team will need to be quarantined, even if they don’t become ill. Many organisations are not adequately set up for working from home, particularly amongst back office staff upon whom so much of a day to day operations rests.
Automation can help solve this problem. By changing the value weighting during process assessments – even on a temporary basis – to bring forward the delivery of automations which remove key person dependencies, the impact of Coronavirus on business operations can be at least partially mitigated.
If you require additional support to rapidly automate as a mitigation for the Coronavirus risk, please contact us urgently.
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