Automating processes within your organization?

Question

Case:

My company deals with creative tasks, which by default are difficult to automate:

• graphic design
• video editing / post-production
• audio composition & sound effects

On the other side, for about 8 hours/day we have:

• 7 computers

that essentially produce nothing during the night time.

There are many macro scripts that can automate certain processes, so that the computers can be used during the night time. A few examples include:

• Creating videos with infographics from Excel spreadsheets (video)
• Applying actions to multiple photos using Photoshop Action Scripts (graphic design)
• Batch processing (audio)

There are also certain operations within the creative tasks that could be evaded by using templates.

Questions:

1. How do you manage to automate repetitive tasks within your organization/processes?
2. What would be your strategic approach to creating value by using both human and CPU resources?
3. Steering the business into the usage of human creative tasks or automating as much processes are possible, depending on the computing power? Would you prefer working with people or machines?

Edit:

Please, use the case just as a reference point to answering these questions about repetition and change management in the context of Project Management.

Answer 1

That's a huge question, including:

• pros and cons of automation
• human machine interaction
• change management

I guess just the last one is related to project management ;)

Automation

Automation is effective if it helps to level human workload to an appropriate level. There are many examples of bad effects by over-automate tasks, esp. in aerospace.

Within your field, over automation might lead to a lack of knowledge or results get to similar (it always looks like...).

But automation is great if you can replace dull and equally returning process steps, demand lot's of calculation or high accuracy.

Search for: automation pro contra, automation workload, bad automation

Human machine interaction

Automation works great if it's supervised somehow by humans. So don't forget to include corresponding possibilities. It would be annoying is people return in the morning, computer are not available, and nobody knows if the programming has crashed or if it will finish in 5 sec.

Search for: Human / man in the loop, out of the loop

Change management

I love to work with computer as long as they assist me and simplify my live. Showing this to the employees will satisfy one of the the first actions in change management: Identify / communicate the need for change in order to get acceptance.

Highlight the reason why to increase automation. Don't forget that automation always demands adaption of the existing peoples capabilities and therefore is a change on the peoples behaviour also. Address this aspect.

Finally don't forget to communicate the whole roadmap:

• We need to...
• Because of that we have to change aspects 1, 2, 3, ...
• We are currently on aspect 2. To fulfil this we need to...
• You'll notice that we are done with aspect 2 / the whole roadmap when...

Sure, iterations might be necessary.

Search for: Change Management