4 Ways Collaboration Improves Process Automation

1.Collaboration gets everyone on the same page before it matters

Automation is an enterprise-wide endeavor. Done right, RPA and intelligent automation can reach every department of your company with technology that improves how work gets done.

The very fact that work getting done relies on this technology signals something important though: this dynamic requires inputs and outputs from both business teams and IT teams. Recognizing this ahead of implementation can ensure your IT team is fully resourced prior to anticipated changes, and that your business teams’ objectives will continue to be met by new technologies.

2.Cross-functional communication helps facilitate a more stable infrastructure

Your company’s technical infrastructure is at the heart of operations. Before you embark on any new technology implementation, stakeholders from operations and marketing should collaborate with IT teams to share business objectives, and help IT understand the ongoing dynamics of capacity needs.

EZFlow helps you take this idea a step further, providing elasticity in your tech stack that flexes for capacity at the time it’s needed—ensuring not only that your company runs as smoothly as possible but also that you can maximize the value you gain from automation. This helps IT provide a more stable infrastructure and better understand the role it plays in business operations. Read more about elasticity and horizontal scaling here.

3.Collaboration improves planning and prevents friction

When objectives from one team are at odds with another, it can prevent progress. Worse, it can cause friction. Avoid both by creating a culture of transparency that clues everybody in to the collective goals. Take the time to build exercises around goals and key performance indicators (KPIs), laddering the objectives of individual teams up to those of the organization as a whole.

4.Putting collaboration at the center of your plan ensures everyone’s needs are met

Without deliberate cross-functional planning, the needs of one team or department can unfortunately be deprioritized in favor of a different team or department. Perhaps it made more sense operationally. Maybe it was a budgeting move. Maybe marketing had a specific campaign and made a request. Regardless of why it happens, once it happens, however unintentional, there is almost instantaneous friction between teams. It will almost inevitably appear to one party that their objectives are less important than their peers’. This might not be true, but perception is still reality!

If teams collaborate from the outset, everyone’s needs go on the table at the same time. While a prioritization of needs will still have to happen, having a voice at the table can make all the difference. It’s no longer personal, and each team can understand why the priorities fall the way they do.

Once these discussions happen, IT teams, business teams, marketing teams, operations teams and the like can all have a broad understanding of the enterprise level goals, and how their contributions fit into them.