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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?

#61

Post by codemac »

kylixz wrote: post #58

As my company grows 50+ our DOO is failing at tracking who's working what and when. We use JIRA and have timekeeping but don't use either for resourcing. Also the company has 10 independent projects. I'd love to have some tool besides a spreadsheet or hearsay about upcoming work and who's doing it.

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.

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

#62

Post by mindcrime »

daw___ wrote: post #8
mindcrime wrote: post #2

I'm working on some marketing automation stuff. Automatically sharing blog post links to Twitter, etc.

If your blog provides an RSS feed then there are many options to choose from to achieve autoposting to Twitter, first two that come to my mind: https://dlvrit.com/ https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter

Yep. I'm more inclined to roll my own right now though, since I have some very specific ideas I want to implement and some other use cases to incorporate. The biggest problem lately has been time. I started down this path sometime last year, but have been letting it sit on the back-burner for a while, in favor of focusing on higher priority tasks. sigh

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

#63

Post by beat »

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…

Thanks. I've been thinking about that and how to present it. It should significantly reduce the duration of downtime incidents, which is a strong sell point if I can phrase it right, but I feel like my best sales force could be senior/lead engineers who want to make their lives easier.

White papers are a fine idea!

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

#64

Post by brazzledazzle »

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 hurt the people doing them. To a developer or ops admin, "This $badthing caused by a typo won't happen again if we automate this" sounds very reasonable but sometimes managers just see it as a mistake that someone will need to be more careful about. Once they've factored the turnaround time into how they estimate they don't seem as interested in speeding things up. All that seems exacerbated by reactionary/feature driven mindsets which makes any kind of improvement that doesn't have an external event/person driving it very hard to get slotted. This seems to be made worse if you're working with a manager that's never really done the work that the people they're managing do or they did it so long ago they don't have an intuitive understanding of how it works today.

Another one is that a lot of people who perform a manual process for a long period of time become invested in it and defensive of it. No matter how much faster or better it is and no matter how involved they are if they end up feeling threatened it's probably dead in the water. Pretty typical human nature thing I think but at a big company with a lot of old established manual processes this can slow automation efforts down to a glacial crawl. Even if there's only one person that fully understands it I don't think managers appreciate the risk of having all of your eggs in one basket.

Eventually things do get automated but it seems like it's driven by a disaster or politics more than anything else. And sometimes not even disaster seems to be enough to drive real change if someone isn't pursuing it.

If anyone has tips on how to deal with any of this I'd love to hear them.

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

#65

Post by ryanworl »

kylixz wrote: post #58

As my company grows 50+ our DOO is failing at tracking who's working what and when. We use JIRA and have timekeeping but don't use either for resourcing. Also the company has 10 independent projects. I'd love to have some tool besides a spreadsheet or hearsay about upcoming work and who's doing it.

Are you talking about the process of assigning tasks for people to complete, having visibility into what is currently being worked on, or having visibility into what was done recently? Or some combination of the three?

I'm guessing you not talking strictly about organizing the tasks and projects themselves since there are a million tools for that.

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

#66

Post by GuiA »

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.…

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 I prepare work in advance to account for it (e.g. collect data from the hardware to enable offline testing), but it's extra overhead.

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

Please tell, what's broken in my org?

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

#67

Post by jasonallen »

blakesterz wrote: post #56

Onboarding of new customers . I feel like we must do this different than most places because I've not been even able to find a good system to even track the steps and things I do to get them set up and started. I've tried just about every task and project manager out there, most of them were good enough, but nothing was ever perfect. Using Basecamp now, has proven to be " good enough " so far (support has been perfec…

I'm confused by what you mean. I'd argue that onboarding new customers should be your core competency, the focus of your main product. What am I missing?

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

#68

Post by SonicSoul »

wslh wrote: post #41
SonicSoul wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the way we solved it was getting the COO to approve us taking ownership of infrastructure and transitioning into AWS. That way we have a pretty flexible license where we can spin up servers and manage them ourselves. Certainly time overhead but at least now we don't have to email and pray. This also sends a strong message that if they don't try hard enough they can lose projects and therefore their worth at the compa…

I wonder how the organization puts limits to the AWS usage. For example, do you need approvals for increasing the AWS usage? Is there a limit for those approvals that require a new contract with Amazon?

we're not a huge company so don't need to worry about that too much. Also we're migrating our production servers from Sunguard to AWS which is 4x cheaper, so we're well ahead on expenses

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

#69

Post by pc86 »

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…

I was with you until you turned it into some weird nonsense about class and age for no reason.

For thousands of years the majority of work occurred in collocation with other people doing the same work as you. Now we have technology that allows for remote work and there are a lot of companies taking advantage of it.

Over time the default will become remote if the specific job allows it. I imagine at some point beyond the default will become remote regardless of the task.

But you can't expect people to change the entire organizational structure of their business overnight "because Slack!"

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

#70

Post by Johnny555 »

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.…

It's because the engineering manager thinks that in-person collaboration works better than a remote team.

I can't really argue with the results, the company is doing exceptionally well. Employees are generally happy (perhaps even excited) to work there, so I disagree that the organization is "broken". We're still a small-ish company, engineering is around 75 people and we all sit in the same area of the office. As we grow, then I imagine that this "in-person" effect (if it exists at all) will diminish

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