Starting or expanding your in-house RPA development team is an exciting move. But handing your whole automation program over to a green team can be scary. Launching your pilot program with Co-pilot Developers will ensure that your first RPA initiative is a successful one.
When does taking on Co-pilot Developers make sense?
When you need a little bit of the right help at the right time. Co-pilot Developers will mentor your new team on as they skill-up to become rockstar RPA developers.
The Co-pilot program allows you fractional usage of high value Senior Developer and Software Architect time. More than simple consulting, these senior team members will be there with you the whole way. They will keep your team on time, on task, and creating code that meets industry best practices.
The Co-pilot Developers program is often used in tandem with our BackStop Service. Your BackStop consultant will help your organization set up your Automation COE. Their goal is to identify the high value processes that are good candidates for automation and allocate resources needed to render that automation. Once the automation goals have been selected the Co-pilot team can operate as a boot camp to get your in-house development team up and humming.
Key areas your Co-pilot Developers will guide your team
Proper Solution Design Practices
When designing an automation, we want to make sure we are looking at the process the robot way. This is a form of process improvement. We consider how processes could be done faster and more effectively without the constraints of human time and human interactions. For example, the human way a process is being performed now items a, b, c are sequential, with occasional response lags. But the robot way they can be done concurrently and almost instant.
The team can then define the RPA code that needs to be created. We will also identify any other technologies we can leverage with API’s or integrations.
Clean Reusable Code
RPA code does not have its own language but it certainly has its own best practices. Each new automation unit builds on or interacts with all previously built units. The better they work together the lower the operating and maintenance costs, and the less your bots will break interrupting workflows.
Your Senior developer will provide guidance as well as consistent review of the code our team is producing. They will train a cohesive team of people to build a cohesive team of robots.
Smoke Testing Your Automation
Incremental testing is key to make sure your build is on track. Where extra guidance is valuable is when putting your automation into a production environment. Testing if the automation functions with real use data and delivers the desired outcomes, while mitigating risks of failed outcomes. Slowly scaling up until your automation is fully functioning and delivering value.
What to expect from your Co-pilot Developers experience
Our experts will act as team leaders to guide and mentor your staff in successfully completing their first automation projects. Companies should expect a balance between training experience and the quality of the automation. Making sure the first bite is the right size bite is key. Select an automation goal that will deliver meaningful value, but one that is not so complex that the development cycle will be prohibitively long. Mission-critical automations you need running yesterday are also a poor choice for a first project.
Expect consistent interaction. We will be designing the process and the timeline with you. The Senior Developer will hold daily stand-up meetings, to assign tasks and check that progress is on track. We will be here to support your team the whole way.
We can help any size team. Whether you are looking to skill-up two or twenty in your RPA development department we can help you. We do recommend to larger teams to make sure they have identified enough meaningful automations to build. We want to make sure that at the end of our bootcamp you have not only skilled developers but useful automations.
