ONPAY SOLUTIONS

PIE Team Internal Tools, Release Notes

For all the energy spent on digital transformations, organizations still have a paper habit with unwieldy manual processes. Armed with the directive from my CTO "to look around the organization to see how we can be more efficient," I wondered how deep we were. 

I discovered this sampling of time-consuming and error-prone manual processes and tasks through research, including interviews and direct observation:

Outsource tedious tasks to robots

Our existing engineering team was at capacity working on our core product, so everyone "politely" declined my invitations to confront our shared dysfunctions. Being the resourceful human that I am, I recruited and signed our IT Support interns after successful negotiations with leadership. 

Everyone was affected by at least one activity that required more effort than necessary.  For clarity, these are the affected groups: C-suite, Sales, Creative and Marketing, Engineering, Finance and Accounting, Operations, Customer Success, Quality Assurance, and Production Support. 

To establish a simple baseline, I measured time in hours because most activities required a minimum of one hour to complete. 

I chose time as the primary metric because each task has a completion time greater than zero seconds, and time is money. Time can be converted to a dollar-value cost with additional calculations. No other measure proved as universal as time, such as number of touches or number of keystrokes. 

The data told us team member performance is as individual as the people, given the wide spread in time to complete tasks by members of the same functional team. The data also revealed high-touch tasks, such as copy-pasting from multiple sources, experienced the greatest amount of time variability because they are undesirable tasks. Finally, task quality declined as the number of rework instances increased.

In addition to saving time, they wanted to work a task once and only once. Further, they wanted to run on autopilot where they did not have to make decisions. When leadership denied my requests to eliminate the tasks, I turned to the Power Platform to explore the viability, suitability, and feasibility of digital workers.

I developed an intensive, hands-on business analysis training curriculum modeled after the Certified Business Analyst Professional certification and added Adam and Avery to the program. 

• I worked with Adam and Avery to align their goals and interests with real-world fintech work, specifically robotic process automation

• I shaped the work, with their input, to maximize their participation during development lifecyles

• I played all roles unfamiliar to them, modeled behavior, and worked on projects

After a few sprints, they felt comfortable assuming their roles as Product Owner and Scrum Master.

I also worked with leadership on strategy, developed forecasts, and even performed a cost-benefit analysis used to justify licensing for Automation Anywhere as our needs outgrew Power Automate. The rapid success of the PIE Team won the approval from the COO and CTO for a $20,000 annual license to increase internal impact and begin customer-facing product ideation.