Overview
Welcome to a learning journey about establishing and growing an RPA Center of Excellence (CoE). This journey looks at the best practices followed by some of Automation Anywhere’s most productive customers. The goal of the journey is to help CoE leaders understand what a CoE is, the benefits that a CoE can provide, and the actionable steps that an organization can take to establish and grow a Center of Excellence that thrives. This journey is designed for people who are:
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Tasked with leading RPA thinking throughout their organization.
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Interested in establishing themselves or their team as internal subject matter experts in RPA.
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Interested in scaling Robotic Process Automation initiatives beyond a single business or technology group.
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Familiar with their organization’s policies and best practices around release management, access controls, and any existing reporting platforms.
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Familiar with Automation 360. (If you aren’t yet, we recommend reviewing the Citizen Developer journey first.)
If the above describes you, or you’re interested in learning about CoE leadership for any other reason, then let’s get going! We organized this journey into learning experiences that build on each other and include resource links and actionable steps to build your CoE.
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What is a CoE?
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We’ll give a brief intro to what a CoE is and dive into the benefits that a CoE can provide for developers, citizen developers, and the entire organization.
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CoE Operational Structures
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We’ll dive into the various governance models of a CoE, how to choose one, and how the best model may evolve based on the maturity and size of your RPA practice.
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Defining Success
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With any CoE practice, it’s important to start with a goal in mind. Define your goals and create standardized groups. Once defined, we’ll work backwards from the goals to determine the key metrics to capture and report on.
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Establishing Development Standards
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With goals clearly defined, it’s essential that a CoE lead code standardization across teams through the development of a bot shell or framework. We’ll talk about the important characteristics of a bot shell and how to record key metrics.
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Executive Support
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Getting executive buy-in is crucial for bringing attention to the RPA program and its wins and needs. This is especially true within large organizations where there is an opportunity for RPA across business groups. We’ll talk about how to get executive buy-in and why it matters.
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Inclusive Over Intrusive Growth
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RPA is different from most enterprise software because many more employees can use it. We’ll look at the best practices for expanding the use of RPA to new functional groups and some challenges that CoE leads may face.
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Release Management
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We’ll talk about establishing best practices for release management and release schedules.
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IT Process Planning
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One of the CoE’s core roles is to plan standard processes for RPA developers to get IT needs fulfilled. We’ll look at how the CoE can make onboarding, developing, testing, and delivering solutions more straightforward for everyone.
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Bringing on Citizen Developers
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Opening up RPA knowledge and access to new users without a development background is an exciting step that helps scale RPA. In this experience, we’ll dive into best practices for training and supporting citizen developers.
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Building a Community
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A CoE cannot scale with the continued sole reliance on a CoE Lead to address everyone’s questions. Here, we’ll talk about practices for establishing a community of RPA developers (citizen and otherwise) who can serve as helpful resources for team members who are new to RPA.
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Opportunity Prioritization
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Once business units throughout your organization have experienced the power of RPA, there will likely be plenty of automation opportunities coming your way. We’ll look at how can you prioritize them.
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Exponential Growth
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With a firm foundation in place, what steps can a CoE take to speed up the delivery time from opportunity identification to bot delivery? In this learning experience, we’ll dive into ways to speed up bot development and improve ROI.
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Resources
Reference Items
Automation Anywhere University
A-People Community Site
Automation Anywhere Product Documentation
Bot Store