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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Inaugural Galaxy Series Badge challenge initiatedBadge Challenge

We are initiating the launch of our Monthly Badge Challenge. Each month we will post a new set of actions you need to take here in the Pathfinder Community in order to earn an exclusive, limited-run badge. You have only that month to complete the challenge before the badge is decommissioned. Commencing countdown on the December Challenge Earn the first of the Galaxy Series badges by completing these actions before December 31st: Start a new conversation in any one of the forums Automation Leaders Forum Citizen Developers Forum Developers Forum Share your “first impression” of our new community via this form

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
How to Hype Your Automation Program

Whether it’s a series of intranet posts, emails or a coveted Intranet hub dedicated to socializing your Automation Program, these are great tips for educating and inspiring your audience about the power of automation. Start by welcoming everyone to your Automation Hub or Email Series. Introduce Automation not so much as an army of bots (which can sound confusing, or scary) but as digital co-workers ready to help with routine work or make someone’s everyday life easier. Here are recommendations from the Automation Anywhere Community. Try them on for size in your own promotion and engagement efforts: Hello world, Meet Your Automation Program Encourage as many people as possible to get involved in the automation process. Let them know that the best way to start is by learning about the power of Automation or reaching out to team members with specific questions. Introduce Your Team Let everyone know your team has been charged with automating the enterprise, and how you’re using technology

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Leverage A+ Accelerators to Start, Accelerate, and ScaleAutomation Pathfinder Program

What are A+ Accelerators? They're concise, pre-packaged, outcome-based services engagements. Created from real-world customer experiences, A+ Accelerators can help solve a wide variety of automation challenges. This collection has been curated specially for you as part of the Automation Pathfinder experience. Choose from a library of A+ Accelerators to solve any issue with scaling automation Delivered by our Professional Services experts who guide you and your team to the right solution Ensure success with validated outcomes-based packages Get the tools, training, and best practices necessary to help drive your automation program success From discovering the next set of processes to automate, to checking the health of your automation program, to improving employee productivity with human-bot collaboration, our Professional Services experts have identified best practices to accelerate your automation journey success. Explore our A+ Accelerators library for a selection of solutions for t

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Special Access: Templates and Planning Documents from Professional ServicesAutomation Pathfinder Program

Your Short Cut to Success We’re giving you a head start with some expert guides for every step of your automation journey. Whether you are just embarking on your intelligent automation journey, scaling your program or driving large scale transformation, these guides from our experts in professional services will help. Bot Velocity Planning (Excel) Process Definition Document (Word) Solution Design Document - Co-Pilot Desktop (Word) Solution Design Document - Co-Pilot Web (Word) Solution Design Document - Co-Pilot On-Demand (Word) Solution Design Document - Co-Pilot Run Local via Event Triggers (Word) Solution Design Document - Run via Control Room Request (Word) Solution Design Document - Run Local On-Demand (Word) Solution Design Document - Run Local On-Demand with Workload Manager (Word) Solution Design Document - Run Local On-Demand (Word) Solution Design Document - Run Local via Event Trigger with Workload Management (Word) Solution Design Document - Run Remote On-Demand (Word) Sol

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Stories of Scale from our Q3 User GroupAutomation Pathfinder Program

Our User Group meetings are always lively and chock full of ideas, ways to overcome challenges, shared goals and so much more. Haven’t attended one yet? Here’s your chance to eavesdrop on the best of what we’ve seen come out of our most recent round of these community gatherings: Theme: Meet our Meta Bot! One customer, a global retailer, shared information about their own automation journey and how they leverage a “Meta Bot” to achieve demonstrable ROI. What’s a Meta Bot? We thought you’d never ask. A “Meta Bot” is a piece of effective, reusable code that, with only a few tweaks, can have multiple applications to automate a range of business processes. Having a “template” bot not only reduces developer time and effort to iterate offshoots, it also blows open the door to opportunities for new use cases, quick wins, and big hour savings. This concept has the power to shift an organization’s mindset of what can be achieved with an automation program. Theme: Work smarter, not harder. There

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
5 Pillars for Moving Your Automation Program "Beyond the Bot"Automation Pathfinder Program

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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Blueprint: Promoting Your Automation ProgramAutomation Pathfinder Program

AKA: So, you didn’t know you needed to be a marketer. When you launched into the position as Automation Leader you were charged with delivering automation to your organization. Obviously, right? Now you’ve delivered some automations and earned your first wins. Next, it’s up to you to communicate your program’s success. Whether it be to key stakeholders, other department heads, or potential business users in the automation orbit, it’s on you to spread the benefits of automation using your program’s results as proof of business ROI. Bet you didn’t know you needed to be a marketer too, eh? No fear – this is your chance to get important buy-in from the rest of your organization so you can accelerate transformation and deliver more impact to your company. Cue Automation fever. When to Promote You’ve delivered your first quick wins with automations, but how do you know when you’ve achieved enough to start shouting your success from the rooftops? Do your initial pilots or POCs carry enough cl

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Blueprint: Driving a Healthy Use Case PipelineAutomation Pathfinder Program

You want a continuous pipeline of new automation use cases to tackle. You already knew that, but how and where do you generate that thriving flow of automation priorities across diverse lines of business? From our experience here at Automation Anywhere (yes, we drink our own champagne), as well as from many community success stories, we’ve extracted three tips to help you drive a healthy use case pipeline. 1. Find Your LOBBF When it’s time to expand your reach after your first wins, there are typically two methods we see Automation Leaders employ to find their next use cases. Crowdsource. This is a strong play for a high volume of ideas. Reach out to users and ask for input on what they should automate next. Theoretically, this is helpful to discover where pain points are for your end users. However, when automation criteria isn’t meticulously outlined, the inbound suggestions can range from far too simple to downright comical–a smattering of ideas that aren’t the quality use cases you

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Blueprint: Demonstrate Maximum Value of Your Automation ProgramAutomation Pathfinder Program

When your automation program is up and humming, it’s undoubtedly providing value to your organization. But in order to understand just how far that value stretches, you have to ask the right questions to unfurl the more substantial, perhaps unquantifiable, metrics that are truly giving your program clout. And the best questions to ask—and answer with metrics—will likely shift based on the phase you’re in: Start, Accelerate, or Scale. Ask the Right Questions Think about baseball and the movie Moneyball. Haven’t seen it? Here’s a synopsis: Because of a limited budget, a young Yale grad comes into the Oakland A’s organization to help them draft and trade players based on some unconventional metrics. Most major baseball organizations with deep pockets like the Yankees draft top picks and pay multi-million dollar contracts to bring in big name, and sometimes overhyped, players. They often want big hitters, so when evaluating a draft or trade pick they asked the question: what’s his batting

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Where to start scaling: Citizen Development or Democratized Automation?Automation Pathfinder Program

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Blueprint: Achieve Hyperscale by Democratizing your Automation ProgramAutomation Pathfinder Program

AKA: Can just anyone really do this? Fact: Citizen Development is hot right now. It’s a buzzword, something stakeholders and sponsors are demanding we make happen and even something many of us may feel we’re behind on. After all, you have your automation program going strong, you’ve had some wins, you’re expanding across the business, it’s driving results…but you haven’t launched a Citizen Development program yet. Are you missing the boat? What is Democratization? Simply put, success at scale is about empowering more people through automation. And that’s NOT just Citizen Development. Democratization is about delivering opportunities around and the benefits of automation to a diverse group of employees at a variety of levels. It’s one of the effective ways to involve teams and talent in a system and a program and, ultimately, make automation a part of your culture that can grow as your organization does. Consider Your Goals What are you trying to get out of opening up automation to the

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Lessons from the Desk of our CIOAutomation Pathfinder Program

From the Desk of our CIO: An Email Template to Promote Your Automation Program If you can craft an email, you can get started on the road to evangelizing your Automation Program. Here’s how we do it at Automation Anywhere. <<Start with the title of your newsletter. Ours is obvious and includes a timeframe:>> Automation @Automation Anywhere Newsletter (FY23 1st Half Update) <<Start the newsletter out with a warm introduction that gets people excited about automation within the organization—here’s an example from our own Automation Leader:>> From the Office of the CIO While Automation Anywhere is helping its customers build a digital workforce, our Global IT organization is doing the same for our internal operations. When I joined last year, I committed to becoming the best customer of our technology. We restructured our internal automation Center of Excellence, set up a customer zero program, and evangelized and scaled our program. These efforts produced significant savings, creating di

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Citizen Development Enablement - Accelerate PhaseAutomation Pathfinder Program

Citizen Development is a lever for scale that many organizations leverage to expand and multiply the ROI for their automation programs. A citizen developer is an employee who comes from something other than a computer-science background - who is creating automations that are consumed by themselves or their team. Citizen Developers are typically motivated business users who’ve identified areas for streamlining/automating areas of their business processes and are interested in creating solutions to meet their own need(s). Organizations who’ve taken on Citizen Development programs have unlocked 2 key benefits: Faster Innovation - With business users able to self-identify, and prioritize their own use cases, they aren’t reliant on the capacity of a central automation development team to deliver innovative automations. ROI Acceleration - The development of additional automations means that organizations are seeing automation impacts more broadly across their organization, rather than being

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Managing Reusable Assets - Start PhaseAutomation Pathfinder Program

There’s a phrase that is said commonly in programming disciplines (developing automations not excluded) - “don’t reinvent the wheel”. This phrase is used to suggest that there may not be a great reason to create something net-new, if there are reusable, potentially optimized assets already available that can be leveraged to solve your problem. In this post, we want to examine how building with a “reusability-first” mindset can accelerate your automation development efforts and ultimately make life as an automation developer easier. Building with a Reusability-First mindset means going through the following thought pattern anytime you come across the need to do something repeatable within your build: Is there something that exists already that I can leverage to make my life easier here? This may be identifying and using a built-in package instead of trying to script something out or this may mean checking within the shared public repository of your Control Room to see what reusable subt

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Exploring Thought Leadership by Contributing to Bot StoreAutomation Pathfinder Program

Now that you have a matured RPA practice, you can start building thought leadership and technical expertise showcase by contributing packages to Bot Store. Packages offer organizations maximum flexibility in the way they create reusable components that can be used across multiple bots. They are modular in that they can be updated independently, and maintain version controls in that upgrading a package doesn’t impact bots built off of a previous version of the same package. Here are some of the ways you can identify what are the packages to build: You have been building bots for a couple of years and you have identified features that would help multiple teams immensely but are not available out of the box, then it's a good use case to build. You want to build bots that automate specific enterprise applications, but there is no such specific package available and it’s currently being automated either using Recorder-Capture or with REST package. Read Analyst reports about popular ERP, CRM

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Contributing Specific Bots to the Bot StoreAutomation Pathfinder Program

As you now have exposure to building production-grade bots and automating a variety of use cases, you can explore contributing specific Bots to Bot Store. Gone are the days we built something for ourselves and thought we just want to keep it to ourselves as they are our USP (Unique selling point), however, what if we told you, there is a better way to build your brand by showcasing your expertise with the world and build competitive advantage online. Now you are curious to know how it can really help you by contributing to Bot Store, let’s look at some of the key benefits: Creates a Marketing funnel Once you publish your bots on Bot Store, your work is seen by a lot of Automation Anywhere customers who look at the Bot Store for new automations to be built. When they download your bot, you will be notified with their email information, which you can use to follow up and understand how it's working for them and offer additional services to build new features or to manage their existing a

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Leveraging Pre-Built Automations and PackagesAutomation Pathfinder Program

Before you start automating any new use case related to a specific process or an application, you’ll want to know exactly what reusable assets you have at your disposal. Automation Anywhere’s Bot Store offers hundreds of pre-built bots and packages built by process automation and integration specialists. Leveraging Bot Store, developers can expect to accelerate their RPA development instead of having to build everything from scratch. Bot Store bots/packages are broken down by business process they serve, their categorization, and by the applications they engage with. Beyond being a location for downloading pre-built bots to include in bot builds, Bot Store is also an excellent place for automation ideas and to explore some of the “art of the possible” with RPA. Automation 360 platform is integrated with Bot Store, meaning, you can directly download the bots to the control room and start using it right away. Bot Store can help you in many ways, lets's take a quick look at some of the ke

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Framework for Expanding Automation OpportunitiesAutomation Pathfinder Program

By now, you’ve hopefully built some familiarity with the Solution Patterns introduced in the Start phase. You’ve likely found that a good number of your use cases fit into one of those patterns, and your familiarity with the patterns has made the process of categorizing, documenting, and delivering automations a more streamlined process. We aren’t ditching those patterns. They are still valid and there are still plenty of new use cases that will come to you that will fit one of the patterns described. We are , however, going to explore a few new patterns so you can expand the types of automation opportunities that the team can take on. This isn't just for the sake of saying “there's different ones too!” Expansion into these new patterns represents a maturity in your use of the full capabilities of the Automation Anywhere platform and enables your automation practice to open up to new ways of thinking about how Automation Anywhere created automations can enable the various business team

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Beginning to Leverage Complimentary TechnologiesAutomation Pathfinder Program

One of the most appealing aspects of Automation 360 is that it's not programming-language-specific. You don't have to be an expert at any specific programming language to be able to build robust, high-impact automations, making for an easy-to-learn, approachable platform. That said, while learning about the capabilities of Automation 360, you may have noticed that it also enables developers to leverage several programming languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, .NET, etc) from within a bot by leveraging language-specific packages and a customizable package SDK. In this blog post, we'll take a look at why you may want to hold off on some of that functionality and when/where it makes sense. Out-of-the-Box Packages: Working with Interfaces Automation 360 offers a wide range of out-of-the-box packages designed to enable automation developers to automate with/on various interfaces. These available packages enable automation developers to automate on top of existing user interfaces (recorder pa

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Propelling the Next Leg of ExpansionAutomation Pathfinder Program

By this point in the journey for your Automation Practice, you’ve partnered with at least one new line of business for the delivery of new automations. Regardless of whether that delivery came by way of your core automation practice doing the design and delivery or you empowered this new line of business to be somewhat independent, the lessons learned and the momentum gained for the expansion of automation across your organization can empower the next leg of expansion within your organization. Let’s look at some keys to systematically scale your automation initiatives as you continue to expand. A Systematic Onboarding Approach Key to expanding your automation efforts to be organization-wide is systematically onboarding new “factories” to your automation practice. As you worked with onboarding your first few lines of business in the Accelerate phase, reflect back on the things that helped this onboarding process to go more smoothly, as well as those things that seemed to confuse/detract

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Delivering Automations for a New Functional AreaAutomation Pathfinder Program

With some successful deliveries attributed to your automation program and some grassroots evangelism efforts underway to communicate the value being delivered for the organization, it's time to explore delivering automations for a new functional area within the organization. As this is likely the first expansion of automation delivery outside of the automation center of excellence team, it will be vitally important to make this first delivery partnership successful, and set the stage for a systematic approach to scale as you move forward. Taking The Show On The Road Similarly to when your automation team got started with automation; identifying quick win processes, capturing and applying best practices, establishing a pattern for documentation and delivery, etc; it will be important that any newly-onboarded factory goes through some of those same steps, albeit enabled by the “lessons learned” from the automation CoE team. All of that said, the participation and involvement of this newl

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Setting the Stage for an Automation-First OrganizationAutomation Pathfinder Program

The Vision for an Automation-First Company Culture Many of the lessons from this journey--from the production of bots, to a robust pipeline where anyone is encouraged to submit ideas, to the ongoing promotion and evangelism efforts--are designed to ultimately support an organization adopting an “Automation-First” company culture. An Automation-First company culture represents a shift for many organizations in the way that they view their processes, their people, and the platforms that they use daily. Knowing how an Automation-First organization views these assets can help set the stage for where your organization can go along its automation journey and can empower you with a vision for how the future of your organization’s digital transformation strategy can be empowered through the expanded adoption of automation. Processes - Objectively looking at the processes that make up the work that individuals are doing across functional areas of an organization, one theme seems to repeat itsel

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Hyperscaling the Automation Journey: Scaling with Citizen Development

Once your automation program has "in orbit" (pun entirely intended) and ready to scale to that next level of your automation program growth. In this special Hyperscaling The Automation Journey series of #AAillustrates, we're diving into the proficiencies of automation programs that grow and scale - with our third session in the series: Scaling with Citizen Development. If you missed one of our previous sessions, we've got them all on the Hyperscaling The Automation Journey landing page - so be sure to check them out for additional content on growing and scaling your CoE. This session's focus is squarely looking at the experience of inviting business users (presumably with 0 background in computer science or information technology) to contribute to the automation program within your organization. Why Citizen Development? There's a couple key reasons why organizations will reach for the Citizen Development lever which looking to scale their automation program: Enabling Function for Busin

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Hyperscaling the Automation Journey: 3 Growth Hacks to Accelerate your Automation Program

Once your automation program has "taken flight" (pun entirely intended) - it can at times be challenging to know what exactly needs to be done to accelerate to that next level of your automation program maturity. In this special Hyperscaling The Automation Journey series of #AAillustrates, we're diving into the proficiencies of automation programs that grow and scale - with our second session in the series: 3 Growth Hacks to Accelerate Your Automation Program. If you missed session one, be sure to check out 3 Pitfalls Keeping Your Automation Program from Growing. Whether you've just stood up your first CoE, or you've been doing this for a few years - these 3 growth hacks can be the jet fuel needed (more space puns) to accelerate your program's growth. Growth Hack 1: Leverage Best Practices The idiom "herding cats" describes the often futile attempts to control or organize a class of entities that are inherently uncontrollable. When a group of independent developers are all given the sa

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Automation Anywhere Team
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Automation Anywhere Team
Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Hyperscaling Your Automation JourneyAutomation Pathfinder Program

Everyone wants an automation program that scales in a sustainable and manageable way. In this series, we're going to be going through the tips and tricks you need to know to set up an automation program that is built for scale. Additionally, we'll share some actionable takeaways that you can get started with right away to ensure you're setting your program up to be successful. Session 1: 3 Pitfalls Keeping Your Automation Program from Growing Everyone gets started somewhere right? In this session, Micah Smith and Mark Goodaire cover the three most common pitfalls keeping automation programs from growing. In this session, you'll learn all about how organizations get stuck in these pitfalls, and most importantly: what they can do about it. 3 Pitfalls Keeping Your Automation Program from Growing Session 2: 3 Growth Hacks to Accelerate Your Automation Program Once you've moved past the getting started phase of your automation program, some organizations stall out. In this session, we'll di

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Automation Anywhere Team

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