When We Should Automate Things

Alright, I will start for easy and short topic today: automation. I’m a big fan of automation because I hate to do repetitive boring tasks (but I still do some).

The idea of automating some repetitive stuffs is that we could allocate our time and energy (that occupied by doing the repetitive tasks) for something else that really matters. Here is the chart posted about this idea by Bruno Oliveira:

This quote somehow represent the chart above:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

That’s why I decided to create some simple scripts to make my life easier. And for the organization, it means that we don’t need to hire more people for manual works, but we just need to create another bot or scripts that handle those manual works. But is it really that simple? No. Let me quote again another point of view (and alternative chart) posted by Jon Udell:

In this view of the world, tasks that involve data manipulation (as so many modern chores do) are undertaken by teams. There is an infinite supply of manual chores. Everybody tackles them. Ideally there is one member of the team I call the toolsmith. Working shoulder to shoulder with the team, the toolsmith spots an opportunity to automate some piece of the work, writes some code, deploys it, observes how it gets used (or doesn’t get used), assesses its impact (or lack of impact), and then iterates on the code. Meanwhile the toolsmith keeps working alongside the team, chipping away at the never-ending and always-evolving list of manual chores, looking for more opportunities to automate, and exploiting them in an incremental and collaborative way.

Software-assisted automation of repetitive work isn’t an event, it’s a process. And if you see it as a contest with winners and losers you are, in my view, doing it wrong.

Yeah if we relate with the real condition (in my case), doing the automation is not one time process. It’s something that you need to iterate. And in another case, create an automation script may create another nightmare like below picture form xkcd (if automating task is more complex than it seems):

Okay back to topic “When should we start to automate things?”, not sure if we do it to soon we will waste time (as well as we do it too late). Here are some factors that I think we need to consider before automating some stuffs:

• Effort: we need to assess whether it’s feasible to do the automation with whatever resource that we have, and measure the effort. As I said, if we failed to calculate we just create another nightmare so don’t promise anything before we know how to do it. Oh and nowadays there are so many tools that help us without writing a single line of code: such as Zapier or IFTTT, but I prefer to code (if it’s easy :P).
• Time: how many hours we spend for the repetitive tasks and for how long? And how many hours we need to spend to create the automation system? Is it worth it?
• Energy: don’t only measure the time spend, but energy that is absorbed to do the repetitive task. There are some cases where we spend so little time but take a lot of concentration and drain energy. Hmm..
• Growth: we already become master for doing some repetitive tasks, but what if we automate and make us thinking out of the box to grow and mastering something else. Seems legit right?

Final Thought

The idea of automation should come from the one who did the repetitive tasks and someone who can create the script, or at least make both of them talk each other so we can measure effort, time, energy, and growth and whether it’s worth it. And for the who make it happen, just do it as quick as possible (so we can do something else). What do you think? Is there ay business process or tasks that can be improved by creating automation?

Hm.. Is this post related to data science? Whatever but may the data be with you!