- I hope you've enjoyed this lesson so far.
Before we wrap up, I thought I'd share some valuable tips
that you might not find anywhere else.
They've been collected over my many years
of exposure to RPA projects across the globe.
While we don't have time for all of them,
I'll go over some of the most prominent ones
that come to mind.
If you have completed the course,
you'll know that IT stakeholders are a critical part
of any RPA initiative.
This is why I'll emphasize again
that it's essential to engage relevant IT functions
as early as possible in the RPA timeline.
In any business, IT is responsible for provisioned access
to internal networks, applications, and infrastructure
as well as ensuring data integrity and security.
These are tasks that are better discussed
and set in place earlier than later.
You don't wanna end up building an RPA solution
that violates IT protocol
and gets you in trouble down the line.
Often, the challenge with getting IT on board,
is that approvals and infrastructure preparation
take time to complete.
Sometimes servers need to be set up,
sometimes new user accounts
need to be made and permissioned.
Unfortunately, I have seen projects stall
to the point of frustration because communication
with IT functions was delayed
and important IT needs were held up.
So I urge you to keep communications with stakeholders tight
and especially so with IT early on.
Next, when you're getting into process design,
make sure the existing process
down to the step-by-step level is clearly understood.
I'm talking full process documentation,
written assumptions, and metric collection.
The more the merrier because this information
will come in handy for benchmarking improvements
and finding pain points.
A lot of this information will come
from the subject matter experts.
So you can count on them to be more accurate
than basic assumptions would be.
But sometimes, as we all know,
one person might have a different way
of doing things than another.
Meaning that you should probably crosscheck
the information if the process is complex enough.
Again, the data you collect will be referenced
countless times during and after development.
So being meticulous is a good idea.
Lastly, when developing your RPA solution, test everything.
RPA will follow the rules exactly how you tell it to.
This doesn't necessarily mean
that there won't be any errors.
RPA can involve many interconnected systems
across various environments,
which means unknown errors or interactions
can creep up now and again.
To make sure you've covered as many bases as possible,
you'll need to prepare for
and conduct comprehensive solution testing.
This course is meant to be introductory
so I won't go into all of the various
testing strategies I've seen.
But one guiding principle I'll say,
is to align your test and production environments
as closely as possible.
Having test cases and test systems
that are identical to production ones
will make deployment smoother and reduce risk.
That's all from me for this lesson.
If you want a full list of lessons learned
from the front lines, feel free to download the full list
form the Exercise Files.
Many organizations don't embrace and defend these tenants
until they've learned the hard way.
But I'm sharing them with you anyway,
may they help avoid even a few potholes along the way.