You’ve seen them quite often around the Pathfinder-verse, heard them speak at events or virtual meetings, maybe even dialogued with them in a forum thread—they’re our Most Valuable Pathfinders! They are the spark keeping the Pathfinder Community ablaze, so it was about time we took a beat to really get to know each one of our MVPs better and share their unique stories with you!

So without further ado, let’s get to know...
 

Paul Hawkins

The Basics

• Years of Automation Experience: 6 or 7 years - he’s lost count!
• Current Company: RBC Brewin Dolphin
• Official Title: Low Code Engineering Team Lead
• But this is how Paul would actually describe what he does: I normally make it easier on people and just tell them I work in IT and type away on my imaginary keyboard and leave it at that! Jokes aside - I’d say I focus primarily on automation work that’s a mix of process improvement and technology. I work with platforms and technology to build out applications to automate pieces of work processes for people.
• Biggest Professional Achievement to date: In my previous role, we automated a new account reconciliation process, that reviewed transactions with millions in value. The process arose due to some underlying system changes and would have required a dedicated team to resolve queries, which there was no capacity for. The end to end process saved an estimated 10FTEs over the course of the year

Five Fun Facts

• His birthday is September 18th
• His favorite TV programs are The Wire, The Sopranos and a UK comedy called Red Dwarf
• As a superpower, he’d love the ability to fly or breathe underwater
• One of the most adventurous things he’s done is go to Iraq for holiday - he recommends it!
• The next place he wants to travel to is Japan

Expertise / Specializations

Paul’s strong suits lie in his technical ability and business analysis. One area he’d like to improve is his leadership skills and internal communication of the accomplishments of their automation program in order to get buy-in not only up the chain from senior management, but also horizontally across other departments. He had an instance when he and his team developed an ad hoc report generation process for one department and everyone saw it and wanted to implement it in their own lines of business. Being able to create more automation FOMO like that would be great!

Within the Automation Success Platform, he mostly uses the core tools like Control Room. He says his team hasn’t had a chance to integrate the other tools from Automation Anywhere like Document Automation, but he is particularly interested in leveraging Process Discovery to help facilitate new opportunities in his pipeline.
 

Paul In The Community

Paul prefers to be present in many communities online. It’s easy to fit that kind of connection and networking into his schedule as time allows, and he finds he is able to learn quite a lot from others who approach the same kind of problems in different ways.

He likes to be hands on when mentoring people. He usually sets aside a few hours every day to sit with his team members to review code, walk through what they’ve done, and show them different approaches or techniques.

If he had one piece of advice for someone new to automation it would be:
 

“Practice! And often, you learn best when you have a specific target in mind. It’s one thing to set out to learn how to program in general, but it’s a powerful experience when you have a particular process you want to automate and have to really think through how to approach it and achieve your goal.”

What’s Next for Paul

Next, he's focusing on synergizing all the platforms they use like Automation Anywhere, Azure, and Power Platform to get them working cohesively in the best way possible. This will make it easier as his program matures to work more quickly and efficiently, as well as be able to identify any problems in processes more proactively rather than waiting for someone to come tell them something's gone wrong.

Thank you, Paul, for letting us all get to know you better. And thank you for your continued contributions to our Pathfinder Community!