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Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

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Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#91

Post by BjoernKW »

cakoose wrote: post #84
BjoernKW wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following: Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.…

I'm not against remote work, but one thing I notice is that it's more efficient to hash out ideas with someone in person. Why do you categorically say that something is broken if it requires personal presence?

In order to challenge to status quo, which is "Personal presence required in all cases, all the time. Period.".

If personal presence is mandatory you'd have a very good reason for it (as in GuiA's case above).

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#92

Post by k__ »

cakoose wrote: post #84
BjoernKW wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following: Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.…

I'm not against remote work, but one thing I notice is that it's more efficient to hash out ideas with someone in person. Why do you categorically say that something is broken if it requires personal presence?

Depends greatly on the job, I think.

If your main field is hardware related, it's probably necessary.

But a software developer, a sales person, a marketer?

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#93

Post by Johnny555 »

beachstartup wrote: post #60
BjoernKW wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following: Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.…

> Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? there is no reasoning behind these policies. it's just someone's decision. you'd be surprised at how much business 'logic' is really just arbitrary choices. the way to fix it is to quit and work for someone/some place that has a sane policy. these social shifts take decades to fully manifest because old rich people don't like changing their way. because they're ol…

The manager at my company that keeps this "no full-time telecommute" policy is in his mid-40's. And he's not rich. Well compensated, yes, but not 20 million dollar home in Atherton and a Tesla rich, more like "drives a BMW 4 series from his Peninsula Condo", but he's certainly not rich enough to not need to work.

So I don't think this is a problem with "old rich people".

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#94

Post by DashRattlesnake »

BjoernKW wrote: post #45
Johnny555 wrote: post #18

I'd get rid of the manual process of driving to the office every day and replace it with collaboration tools to let people telecommute full time. We actually use such tools, but have a "no remote workers" policy. Occasional work from home is fine, just not full time.

Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following: Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.…

> Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier.

> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.

Maybe I'm not enough of a smartphone-enabled digital native for the 21st century, but there are actually social benefits to seeing and interacting with people in-person. Work is a social activity.

> Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover potential for optimisation.

No, I really doubt it. Maybe it would make a few people happier, but I really doubt it would be general. I've worked remotely with people and they never feel fully-fleshed out vs. the coworkers I regularly interact with in person. It would kinda be nightmarish for my entire workday to be like that.

The "optimization" aspect is probably even more unappealing, and reeks of the kind of narrow and aloof thinking that lead to Soviet continuous production weeks [1], which made it difficult for workers to maintain a social life.

I'm not saying that remote work should be totally banned. I think the flexibility offered by allowing people to do it occasionally is very humane, and perhaps it could help people who have some kind of condition that makes it hard for them to interact directly with others. However, it just doesn't seem wise to have remote work be the default.

[1] http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/Soviet_revolutionary_calenda...

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#95

Post by BjoernKW »

GuiA wrote: post #66
BjoernKW wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following: Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.…

My organization requires personal presence because we work on prototype hardware that costs several hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars to make, so we can't just make one for each of us and bring it home. (And even if we could, these things require regular fixing, and if I'm in Japan and the girl who knows how to resolder a certain component in Chile, that's not very practical) Sometimes I can work from home if…

> > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken

> Please tell, what's broken in my org?

What I'm getting at with this is that if personal presence is mandatory you should have an actual reason for that. Your organisation obviously does.

The more usual reason for mandatory personal presence unfortunately is "Because it's always been done this way and we like to see butts in seats because we don't trust our employees nor do we know how to manage what they're working on or how to measure their results."

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#96

Post by NumberCruncher »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #64

This isn't really what you were looking for so feel free to flag me as off topic since I'm kind of piggybacking on it. I feel like a lot of people at bigger companies know what needs to be done, how to do it, want to do it and sometimes have even purchased something to accomplish it but we have the hardest time getting traction. I think one major issue is that manual processes often don't really "hurt" managers, they…

Automate your own tasks and do not tell anybody. Have a chilled out life!

It worked out for me until a got hospitalized for weeks and the college who took over my tasks figured it out. I did the same two more times and leard a lot about refactoring bad architectures. I jumped ship an sold myself as the guy who automates processes. Now I can refuse doing boring manual tasks. It makes me really satisfied.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#97

Post by BjoernKW »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #90
BjoernKW wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following: Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence.…

> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken Don't you wonder why politicians hold town meetings in person? Edit: Also, if your org doesn't require personal presence it is vulnerable to some attacks.

> Don't you wonder why politicians hold town meetings in person?

Because town meetings are a performance. I prefer a live performance over a canned version, too (such as watching a well-crafted presentation instead of a YouTube recording). There's absolutely nothing against meeting people in person. Those meetings should count however. They should mean quality time (instead of a synonym for "Free doughnuts and countless person-hours wasted.").

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#98

Post by codemac »

kylixz wrote: post #75
codemac wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear about various solutions for this as well. So many tools are so heavy weight, and others are too lightweight.. and everyone ends up with something JIRA/Bugzilla + spreadsheets and reports.

Agreed. One thought I had was to just toss project names into Trello columns and move people around as a starting point for management.

Don't be afraid to do the next least janky thing. Run with it. It's like David Allen with GTD:

If you can't do it with paper, you don't understand your process enough yet.

A manual process that is well understood can be well automated, an undefined process will struggle as automating something while also defining something always ends being a huge long project. If you can mentally model how to do it in trello, then do it, and come back to the automation step once you see it working (they have an API, you can get there).

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#99

Post by xiaoma »

chadgeidel wrote: post #43
xiaoma wrote: post #22

Dealing with US banks from abroad. It took an absurd amount of effort to get an account opened and after over a month, I still don't have debit cards.

I'm pretty sure this is a "feature" not a "bug" due to regulation. I'm not saying it's bad or good (I understand why).

Someone asks what I manual processes I want automated, I tell them.

Actually, automating "dealing with regulation in general" would be the most amazing thing ever.

Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

#100

Post by DrJokepu »

btown wrote: post #59
beat wrote: post #39

A related question, for my own interests... how able do you feel to automate things at work? If you find a tool that can automate a severe pain point, can you bring a vendor in for a demo? Can you get a budget or get a manager to pay for automation tools? As a founder about to hit the market with an automation tool, I'm very curious about the roadblocks and resistance that engineers perceive about bringing in tools t…

It's generic advice, but: Make sure you're solving the manager's pain point, not the low-level employee's (i.e. "this gets the information/service to you with a higher guarantee of quality and always at your fingertips" rather than "this saves your employee a lot of stress"), and make sure you're marketing to the manager, not just the low-level employee. And if you get lower-level employees as leads, make sure they h…

Actually, if you really want to score some office politics brownie points, you should try to solve the manager's manager's pain points!
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