Some of the best performing companies today have automated up to 75% of their management processes. While this trend is showing no signs of slowing down, it’s important to take a look at how automation fits into project management in order to fully understand their relationship. With automation you strive to remove redundancies, increase efficiency, and eliminate errors from a process. Let’s take a look at why and when automation can be implemented within project management, and when automation should be avoided.
Push to Scale
In smaller to mid-sized companies, scaling is a central pillar to the company’s success. Many companies fail when they are at a formidable size because they are not set up internally to scale beyond what made them successful in the first place. With projects being a vehicle to implement strategy, it is one of the means companies will use to scale. When automation is implemented within a project management system, organizations have much more control over the speed at which they can grow.
Offload Busy Work
There are many tools that help project managers manage their processes, one of which has can greatly reduce the “busy work” surrounding projects. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is becoming the new best friend of many project managers who utilize on-premise or cloud-based software to manage workflows. Think of the “robots” in RPA systems as little software employees that can be trained to do the mundane data entry and other repetitive tasks many project managers still rely on humans for. This reduces errors in the system and allows human employees to focus more on strategic or creative solutions for the organization.
Process automation can take over things like creating contracts or invoices and document generation and more. This will allow project managers to quickly generate consistently compliant documents and records without mistakes or the need to review each one. These automated forms will allow workers to quickly and accurately submit information when team members are working remotely or out in the field, ensuring a process does not slow down due to a team member’s availability in the office.
Connect Disparate Systems
Automation in project management is one of the best ways to ensure that typically disparate software environments can be connected and checked against each other for error. On projects requiring integration between disparate systems, many issues, like inconsistent data, can be avoided if you implement third party automation software to connect all of your different platforms. It will ensure that when data is entered into one system, the other integrated systems are updated or added with the same data. This ensures everyone is seeing the same data and data quality improves. Employees become more efficient and projects requiring integration, are more successful.
Refine Processes and Measuring Success
Many projects can run into bottlenecks when deliverable reviews are required. Automation can optimize this process so that all approvers are notified when they need to review data that’s been uploaded to the system. When feedback is given, the original assignees receive it all in one place, organized chronologically.
Effective communication is the key to good project management; automating data integration into multiple systems and automating reviews are all examples of automation making project communication fast and accurate
When not to Automate Project Management
Although automation may seem like the best thing ever, but there are times when it is not appropriate. This is mainly when your project management processes are not fully established or potentially different processes are used per department or per project. Remember that automation is, well, automatic! Once in place, the data entry or data transfers will just happen.
If your processes are not matured or too different from others, data will end up in the wrong places without the right people being notified. Automation in project management should be used once processes are fully established and ready to scale up to meet company demands, not before.
Final considerations
Automation has the benefit of reducing errors while increasing efficiency. When your organization is at the critical point where it needs to scale, and there is a need for better measurement and reduced busy work, automation tools should be implemented to help you grow.
If your internal processes are not mature and solidified, hold off on implementing automation within your project management systems to avoid unnecessary confusion and mistakes due to the volume of data that could potentially be mismanaged.