As the head of a research and development team, what are you most focused on? Development process, product quality, delivery speed… When you implement a set of rules, procedures, and reports, you may be missing an important part of your productivity.

** And work efficiency can be divided into active and passive. ** The so-called active is determined by the team members’ own enthusiasm and sense of responsibility. We can inspire through training, motivation, communication and other means. Passive work efficiency has nothing to do with the employees themselves, but is simply caused by too much repetitive and transactional work.

As a research and development team, we should focus on how much time members put into the final product delivery. You should maximize the proportion of this time and reduce the proportion of other work. In one survey, 67% of managers agreed that their staff members spend a lot of energy on repetitive, transactional tasks. How to save this time through automation is a problem that team managers are eager to solve at present.

What can automation tools do for a development team?

To improve efficiency

No one wants to do repetitive, transactional, unskilled but tedious work. Your r&d team should not waste valuable time (and therefore cost) on these things, but instead focus on business work that will bring real value to your customers.

By automating repetitive tasks, your team will have more time and experience to handle larger projects, more clients, and higher quality, reliability, and scalability.

Reduce human error

We all make mistakes, no matter how many rules, processes, reviews, and checks we have. And the more manual, transactional, less technical work, the more work, the more prone to error. Such as:

• Incomplete or with incorrect data

• The document was saved in the wrong place

• Sensitive information was mistakenly sent to unrelated people

Automated workflow can solve these problems well. It keeps the data in sync all the time, ensuring that all the required fields have values (the default) when the data is entered. Provide encryption as data is transferred, and ensure that only the person specified in the workflow can access sensitive information.

Responsible teams

How to improve members’ sense of responsibility and make the team become a responsible and reliable team is a big challenge in team management. Accountability is defined by team members who take the initiative to take on tasks and make sure they are met before deadlines are met. The introduction of automated workflows, while not a fundamental solution to this problem, can make a noticeable difference to the team. Such as:

• Inform team members about the next steps

• Remind team members of task deadlines

Effective communication

Although we already have a lot of communication and collaboration tools, both free and paid, there are still a lot of companies using email, wechat groups, sharing files, etc. It’s unquestionably inefficient, and everyone is inundated with information.

After completing a task, you can find related tasks and remind the person in charge of them. You can also alert the owner of new tasks that have been added during the current iteration. These are things that used to require team members to do manually or send a mass email, but automated tools can automatically notify them, ensuring timeliness and ensuring that information is not lost.

Better customer support

The customer is king. Whether you are serving end users or a division of an enterprise, you should constantly improve the customer support experience. How can automated products help in this regard?

The most typical example is customer feedback on product defects. If we can inform the processing status of defects, processing progress and notification of new version launch as soon as possible, it will undoubtedly improve customer satisfaction. On the other hand, if the customer doesn’t get feedback for a long time, even if we fix the bug and put it online, there will still be dissatisfaction.

If we can make the progress of defect handling and launching of the R&D department automatically synchronize to the customer support department, and then feed back to customers in the first time, it will undoubtedly improve customer satisfaction.

Automation brings teams not only the introduction of a tool, but also a change in work habits. The next question might be, how do I start my automation journey? The following points require special attention when introducing automation.

Find repetitive tasks

The primary function of automation tools is to change repetitive tasks from manual to automatic. The first thing we need to do is find those repetitive tasks. Which tasks are repetitive? It may be hard to tell for a while. Let’s start with the following list:

• Tasks to perform daily, weekly, and monthly.

• Time consuming tasks.

• Work without much thought and judgment.

• Work with a fixed process.

• A lot of data to manipulate, or a lot of processing to do.

• High requirements for correctness, but manual handling of tedious error-prone work.

Not all of these traits need to be met when looking for such repetitive work. But if a job already meets the above two characteristics, then it most likely needs to be automated.

For example, our r&d team has a requirement that when a work item is completed, subsequent (blocked) work item leaders are notified that work can begin. This is a classic case of repetitive work. because

• Time-consuming: Engineers need to search for follow-up tasks, find the corresponding personnel, and notify them one by one orally or by email.

• No thinking: Completely transactional, no need to think about whether or to whom to notify.

• Set a routine: Do this for each task you complete.

In a similar way, you can examine the current development team’s work and find similar tasks.

Define business value

Finding repetitive work is only the first step. Then, before we find these jobs, we need to figure out what benefits automation can bring to us one by one, and it must be the benefits to our end users, which is the so-called business value. Such as:

• Improve team efficiency and product development efficiency.

• Shorten customer response time and improve customer satisfaction.

• Improve product quality.

Being clear about the business value allows us to introduce automation tools without missing the point, not for automation’s sake.

Team training

Any change to your team needs the support of your team members, even if you think it’s good for everyone. Anyone will instinctively resist change because existing processes and ways of working are proven and familiar. Therefore, training is essential.

When I say training, I’m not just talking about training sessions or training manuals. The introduction of automation products needs to be gradual. Start with iteration retrospectives, daily meetings, or team communications sessions to identify the repetitive tasks that everyone agrees are time-consuming and most urgent. In addition, when choosing automation tools, try to choose those that are easy to use, intuitive, and can better integrate with existing development tools. Try to reduce the cost of learning for everyone.

Design your automated workflow

Once you have identified the repetitive work, the business value, and the support of your team members, you can start designing automated workflows. But be careful not to automate all at once, even though we may find a lot to improve. Introducing too many automated processes at once can overwhelm team members.

What we need to do is find the most urgent one or two scenarios and replace them with automated tools. Let the team immediately feel the change, improve efficiency, simplify work, and gradually adapt to the effect of automatic data flow. Then implement the next scenario or two.

At the same time, pay close attention to the feelings and feedback of the team, and constantly adjust the degree of automation — not the more the better. We need to find a balance in the process of trial and error that works best for the team: automatic and manual.

Measure the effect of implementation

Both Agile and DevOps are all about what’s called closed loop, which is constantly summarizing and improving. The same is true with the introduction of automated tools. We want to periodically review some indicators after the implementation of automation tools, with data to confirm whether our assumptions are correct, whether the goal is achieved. Typical measures might include:

• Efficiency improvement: Calculate the time saved by automation tools through time statistics and other methods.

• Lead time reduction: The improvement of development performance is verified by calculating the lead time of requirements (the total time from requirement confirmation to market).

• Improved customer satisfaction: whether the repair time of defects is shortened, and whether the frequency and timeliness of customer communication are improved.

Through the above steps, we believe that every team can smoothly introduce automation tools, improve development efficiency, reduce communication costs, achieve higher business value, let team members focus on the development of actual business needs, and leave repetitive work to tools to complete.

As mentioned above, when introducing automation tools, try to choose products that are easy to use, intuitive, and integrate well with existing development tools. In the next article, we will show you how PingCode Flow can quickly implement automated rules and apply them to the PingCode product matrix, as well as what rules are used by our own R&D team and some of our in-beta customers to improve development efficiency.

Stay tuned.