When I write the word “Automation” in the context of a company – what are the first things that come to mind? If you’re used to working in a technology company, you might think of any number of things like CI/CD, Jenkins, Teamcity – automated testing – probably some other things too. Allow me to ask – when I asked about automation, did you immediately think of developers and coding in your head? You’re not alone.
But why do we limit the application of these processes to just the technical folks in the engineering team? If it can benefit engineers, it can benefit everyone else as well. I’m going to give two examples that show that automation – and a lot of devops practices for that matter – are for everyone, not just the engineering team.
A UX team that doesn’t use code – but it still can use automation!
In my first example – I once worked with a team that creates user help content in the form of web documentation. When they get ready to release a new version of their software, there is a corresponding release of documentation for the new features they made. The developers enjoy an automated build, automation testing, feature toggles – they do really well as far as devops practices go. The UX team that works on the web documentation? They manually test – they have a test environment, and they manually check each change they made – if they have time.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If we can make automated testing for web apps like Facebook, Spotify’s web player, and Fidelity’s financial retirement dashboards – we certainly can equip our web-based documentation teams with the ability to run things like dead-link detection, asserting that the new feature’s page tree is up and looks right – all sorts of things. How much time does the team take reviewing what they already did by hand – when we could have a machine do it. And then think about being able to automatically check everything you did in the past so that you can detect if something accidentally broke. There isn’t a code developer anywhere near this team – but that doesn’t mean this team deserves any less treatment with automation.
Can automation help reduce those boring status meetings?
Have you ever sat through a status meeting, where slide after slide, week after week, you see the same thing – this feature is red, this feature is green… so on so forth? This is another spot where automation can save everyone a heck of a lot of time – and give you an hour back on your calendar. Ask yourself this question the next time you are in such a status meeting – “Do I need to be here in order to learn the information being discussed here, and does everyone else need to be here in order for me to ask questions?
Do we need to manually create those slide decks every week? If the primary functions of creating the slide deck week to week are copy and pasting, then no – you can automate this! Don’t spend time copying and pasting, and don’t spend time in an hour-long status meeting where the rate of reading information is down to the lowest common denominator. What could you, and the poor soul who has to author the slide deck every week, do with that time back?
To wrap this all up – automation is not just for engineers or coders. It’s for everyone. If you feel busy but not productive, that is what automation is perfect for!
So automation is for everyone – now what?
If you’re reading this and thinking “This sounds great, but how do I start?” – contact me! Join my discord server Lunar Agility – https://discord.gg/jb75nn, or reach out directly linked in https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewstudley/ – I’ll be happy to take a look at your specific scenario. If there’s enough interest I can even create a class.