Most of marketing at traditional compnaies can be automated by ML. This is already happening, but there are huge F500 companies where the employees have an incentive not to automate.
Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
71–80 of 258 posts
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#72I'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.…
The reasoning behind our COO's no(low)-remote policy is that he cannot tell if someone is simply punching in and then watching TV. Meanwhile, he is oblivious to the dozens of in-house workers who are punching in and chatting, doing things on their phone, anything but their work, etc. I have one employee who was grandfathered in, since he's been working remotely since before the COO's random policy decision, and he's the most productive worker I have.
It's completely ridiculous, but you just can't get through to some people, no matter how logical your challenges are. The only reasoning I can see is that our COO is also the VP of Sales (small company), and he values "face time", and "body language", and "reading the room", and some such nonsense that only applies to sales and negotiations, but not production.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#73As 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.
More than anything the DOO probably just needs to learn how to do their job, communicate with people, and use the tools we already have. But yes -- not necessarily high fidelity within a project. More like "Because of funding on X you will be moving to work with Tanya on February 27. The program manager is Harvey and you will be allocating your time to account #777." And then based on that sort of information having a matrix or GANTT chart of which employees are charging where and which project. Perhaps the organization is just dysfunctional and no tool will solve the problem.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#74As 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 think I can help with this. If you're interested in getting better visibility on what projects are in-flight and who's working on what, send me an email ray@ObjectiveIQ.com
I'd be happy to send you an invite for our private beta. Think of it as a blend between Slack and Jira.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#75As 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.
Agreed. One thought I had was to just toss project names into Trello columns and move people around as a starting point for management.
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should automate the discovery of startup ideas by posting a thread here every few days.
That would be a quick way to get banned.
Are you really going to let that stop you? https://luminati.io/ http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#77Phone screens, for recruiters and applicants. Basically I want both sides to be faithfully represented by conversational AI, inclusive of demeanor, domain knowlege, and general aptitude.
Hahahah! You just made me think of creating a chatbot to answer people's questions about me for phone screen interviews, since answering the same questions over and over and over again has gotten me to the point where I sometimes procrastinate getting back to recruiters because I don't want to go through the process for the fiftieth time.
"How much experience do you have with Unity?" : "I worked with Unity on projects blah and blah and....". "Tell me more about your leadership in project blah?" : "With project blah, I was in charge of X number of people. The project was completed over a period of X months and ...etc."
That's what you're suggesting, isn't it?
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#78Ordering of stuff from central IT. I waited 3 months for my RSA token (which I need for working remotely). My boss waited 4 months for a dev server he desperately needs for a customer project. The request for the server was only processed when my boss talked to some other guy who knows someone from the central IT department. And the requested server wasn't even physical hardware but a virtual server!
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
hentrap - msg or email me. I've been itching to create a new project that also solves a huge/real pain. I'd really like to hear your workflow steps in detail. Here's a temp email I setup if you want to reach out: hn@robodale.33mail.com (removed public mailinator email per mbrookes advice)
You guys realise that mailinator is public? Dale, I can see your email address. I highly recommend 33mail.com instead - it has a pretty generous free tier: http://33mail.com/rj37w3 . (Not associated, just a long-time user and happy paying customer.)
haha, oh crap mbrookes. Looks like I fell on my face with this. Thanks for the 33mail tip. Hey, hentrap - email me here:
hn@robodale.33mail.com
Re: Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
#80Logging jira tempo hours.