Automation – a term which encompasses a huge range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes – is everywhere. The irony being that it takes human input to create automated processes in the first place!
Automation is available in so many software tools for the office, making it difficult to ignore. What I love is it can streamline processes, giving me more time to focus on more critical and creative tasks for our clients.
Automation has been revolutionary in helping to make workflows and processes more streamlined. As technology becomes more and more sophisticated, you can press one button and multiple actions will automatically follow. In processes where there are repetitive and easily-replicated tasks, this has been a game changer.
When asked to automate our blog process, I knew we already had the experience and tools we needed to do this successfully because of the work we do for our clients to engineer new programmes and re-engineer faltering processes.
We created an editorial calendar to map out the tasks and expectations for each person. This step was crucial to ensure we automated a sound process, rather than made a bad process faster. We then built automated workflows for the process using Smartsheet so that alerts and reminders go out at the right times so everyone knows what to do, when and why.
Our small team takes it in turns to create the blogs and so dip into the process infrequently. That’s why we have engineered the process to make it easy to manage, but especially to make it intuitive so the team doesn’t need to remember how the process works, it just works and everyone knows what is going on and when.
Simple and effective automation gives you more time to be creative in their thinking – which is something you definitely cannot automate! If you are looking for more time to be creative or want to talk to us about making your processes simple and efficient, there’s an automated message link below 😉
