Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT

Automation
Free up time for value-adding jobs.

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ANALYST PERSPECTIVE
Automation cuts both ways.

Automation can be very, very good, or very, very bad.

Do it right, and you can make your life a whole lot easier.
Do it wrong, and you can suffer some serious pain.
All too often, automation is deployed willy-nilly, without
regard to the overall systems or business processes in which it
lives.
IT professionals should follow a disciplined and consistent
approach to automation to ensure that they maximize its
value for their organization.

Derek Shank,
Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations
Info-Tech Research Group

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Executive summary

Situation
• IT staff are overwhelmed with manual repetitive work. 1. Optimize before you automate.
The current way isn’t necessarily the
• You have little time for projects. best way.
• You cannot move as fast as the business wants.
2. Foster an engineering mindset.
Your team members may not be
Complication process engineers, but they should
learn to think like one.
• Automation is simple to say, but hard to implement.
• Vendors claim automation will solve all your problems. 3. Build a process to iterate.
Effective automation can't be a one-
• You have no process for managing automation. and-done. Define a lightweight process
to manage your program.

Resolution
• Begin by automating a few tasks with the highest value to score quick wins.
• Define a process for rolling out automation, leveraging SDLC best practices.
• Determine metrics and continually track the success of the automation program.

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Infrastructure & operations teams are overloaded with work

• DevOps and digital

transformation
initiatives demand
increased speed.

• I&O is still tasked

with security and
compliance and
audit.

• I&O is often
overloaded and
unable to keep up
with demand.

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Manual repetitive work (MRW) sucks up time

• Manual repetitive work is a fact of life in

I&O.

• DevOps circles refer to this type of work

simply as “toil.”

• Toil is like treading water: it must be done,

but it consumes precious energy and effort
just to stay in the same place.

• Some amount of toil is inevitable, but it's

important to measure and cap toil, so it
Follow our methodology to
does not end up overwhelming your
focus IT automation on
reducing toil.
team's whole capacity for engineering
work.

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Manual hand-offs create costly delays

• Every time there is a

hand-off, we lose
efficiency and
productivity.

• In addition to the cost

of performing manual
work itself, we must
also consider the
impact of lost
productivity caused
by the delay of
waiting for that work
to be performed.

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Every queue is a tire fire

Queues create waste and are extremely

damaging. Like a tire fire, once you get started,
they’re almost impossible to stamp out!
Increase queues if you want

“More overhead”

“Lower quality”

“More variability”

“Less motivation”

“Longer cycle time”

“Increased risk”

Source: Edwards, citing Donald G. Reinersten: The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation
Lean Product Development

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Increasing complexity makes I&O’s job harder

Every additional layer of

complexity multiplies points of
failure. Beyond a certain level
of complexity, troubleshooting
can become a nightmare.

Today, Operations is
responsible for the
outcomes of a full stack of a
very complex, software-
defined, API-enabled system
running on infrastructure
they may or may not own.
– Edwards

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Growing technical debt means an ever-rising workload

• Enterprises naturally accumulate technical

debt.
• All technology requires care and feeding.
• I&O cannot control how much technology it’s
expected to support.
• I&O faces a larger and larger workload as
technical debt accumulates.
The systems built under each new technology paradigm never fully
replace the systems built under the old paradigms. It’s not uncommon for
an enterprise to have an accumulation of systems built over 10-15 years
and have no budget, risk appetite, or even a viable path to replace them
all. With each shift, who bares [SIC] the brunt of the responsibility for
making sure the old and the new hang together? Operations, of course.
With each new advance, Operations juggles more complexity and more
layers of legacy technologies than ever before.
– Edwards
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Most IT shops can’t have a dedicated engineering team

• In most organizations, the

team that builds things is best
equipped to support them.
• Often the knowledge to People who build
design systems and the things
knowledge to run those
People who run
systems naturally co-exists in things
the same personnel
resources.
• When your I&O team is trying
to do engineering work, they
can end up frequently
interrupted to perform Personnel resources in most IT
operational tasks. organizations overlap heavily
between “build” and “run.”

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IT operations must become an engineering practice

• Usually you can’t double your staff or double their hours.

• IT professionals must become engineers.
• We do this by automating manual repetitive work and reducing toil.
Work Camp Operations
Do X.
Do X.
Do X.

Engineering Operations

Design machine that does X.

Build machine that does X.
Maintain machine that does X.

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Build your Sys Admin an Iron Man suit

Some CIOs see a Sys Admin and want to replace them with a Roomba.
I see a Sys Admin and want to build them an Iron Man suit.
– Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO, Puppet

Automation 1.0: Automation 2.0:

Replace Employees With Robots Give Employees Superpowers

Reduce
Replace Sys Build Sys Boost work
overhead from
Admin with Admin Iron output to ~10x
layoff of 1x
Roomba Man Suit Sys Admin
Sys Admin
Return on Automation Return on Automation
700,000 700,000 630,000
600,000 600,000
500,000 500,000
400,000 400,000
300,000 300,000
200,000 200,000
100,000 70,000
100,000
0 0
Annual Dollar Value Annual Dollar Value

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Use automation to reduce risk

Consistency
When we automate, we can make sure we do something
the same way every time and produce a consistent result.

Auditing and Compliance

We can design an automated execution that will ship logs
that provide the context of the action for a detailed audit
trail.

Change
• Enterprise environments are continually changing.
• When context changes, so does the procedure.
• You can update your docs all you want, but you can't make people read
them before executing a procedure.
• When you update the procedure itself, you can make sure it’s executed
properly.
Source: Edwards

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Follow Info-Tech’s approach: Start small and snowball
Because the C-suite relies on
upwards communication — often
filtered and sanitized by the time it
reaches them — executives don’t see
the bottlenecks and broken
processes that are stalling progress.
– Andi Mann
• It’s difficult for I&O to get the
staffing resources it needs for
engineering work.
• Rather than trying to get buy-in
for resources using a “top
down” approach, Info-Tech
recommends that I&O score
some quick wins to build
momentum.
• Show success while giving
your team the opportunity to
build their engineering chops.
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Info-Tech’s methodology employs a targeted approach

• You aren’t going to automate IT

operations end-to-end overnight.

• In fact, such a large undertaking

might be more effort than it’s
worth.

• Info-Tech’s methodology
employs a targeted approach to
identify which candidates will
score some quick wins.

• We’ll demonstrate success, gain

momentum, and then iterate for
continual improvement.

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Invest in automation to reap long-term rewards

• All too often people think of automation like a vacuum cleaner you
can buy once and then forget.
• The reality is you need to perform care and feeding for automation
like for any other process or program.
• To reap the greatest rewards you must continually invest in
automation – and invest wisely.
To get the full ROI on your automation,
you need to treat it like an employee.
When you hire an employee, you invest in
that person. You spend time and
resources training and nurturing new
employees so they can reach their full
potential. The investment in a new
employee is no different than your
investment in automation.
– Edwards

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Measure the success of your automation program

Example of How to Estimate Dollar Value Impact of Automation

Metric Timeline Target Value
Hours of manual 12 months 20% reduction $48,000/yr.1
repetitive work
Hours of project 18 months 30% increase $108,000/yr.2
capacity
Downtime caused 6 months 50% reduction $62,500/yr.3
by errors

1 15 FTEs x 80k/yr.; 20% of time on MRW, reduced by 20%

2 15 FTEs x 80k/yr.; 30% project capacity, increased by 30%
3 25k/hr. of downtime.; 5 hours per year of downtime caused by errors

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Automating failover for disaster recovery

CASE STUDY Industry

Source
Financial Services
Interview

Challenge Solution Results

An IT infrastructure The manager hired The infrastructure

manager had consultants to build team reduced their
established DR scripts that would achievable RTOs as
failover procedures, execute portions of follows:
but these required a the failover and pause Tier 1: 2.5h0.5h
lot of manual work to at certain points to Tier 2: 4h1.5h
execute. His team report on outcomes Tier 3: 8h2.5h
lacked the expertise and ask the human And now, anyone on
to build automation for operator whether to the team could
the failover. proceed with the next execute the entire
step. failover!

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Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your
needs

Guided
DIY Toolkit Implementation Workshop Consulting

“Our team has already “Our team knows that “We need to hit the “Our team does not
made this critical we need to fix a ground running and have the time or the
project a priority, and process, but we need get this project kicked knowledge to take this
we have the time and assistance to off immediately. Our project on. We need
capability, but some determine where to team has the ability to assistance through the
guidance along the focus. Some check-ins take this over once we entirety of this project.”
way would be helpful.” along the way would get a framework and
help keep us on track.” strategy in place.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

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 Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation – project
overview
1. Select
Candidates
1.1 Identify MRW pain points
1.2 Drill down pain points
into tasks
1.3 Estimate the MRW
involved in each task
1.4 Rank the tasks based on
value and ease
1.5 Select top candidates
and define metrics
Best-Practice 1.6 Draft project charters
Toolkit
Introduce methodology.
Review automation
candidates.
Review success metrics.
2. Map Process
Flows
2.1 Map process flows
2.2 Review and optimize
process flows
2.3 Clarify logic and finalize
future-state process flows
Review process flows.
Review end-to-end
process flows.
4. Build
3. Build Process
Roadmap
3.1 Kick off your test plan for 4.1 Build automation
each automation roadmap
3.2 Define process for
automation rollout
3.3 Define process to
manage your automation
program
3.4 Define metrics to
measure success of your
automation program
Review testing Review automation
considerations. roadmap.
Review automation SDLC.
Review automation
program metrics.

Guided
Implementations
Module 1: Module 2: Module 3: Module 4:
Identify Automation Candidates Map and Optimize Processes Build a Process for Managing Build Automation Roadmap
Automation
Onsite
Workshop
Phase 1 Results: Phase 2 Results: Phase 3 Results: Phase 4 Results:
• Automation candidates and • End-to-end process flows • Automation SDLC process, • Automation roadmap
success metrics for automation and automation program
management process

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 Reduce Manual Repetitive Work With IT Automation –
Workshop overview
Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
Workshop Day 1
Identify Automation
Candidates
1.1 Identify MRW pain
points.
1.2 Drill down pain points
Activities
into tasks.
1.3 Estimate the MRW
involved in each task.
1.4 Rank the tasks based
on value and ease.
1.5 Select top candidates
and define metrics.
1.6 Draft project charters.
1. MRW tasks
2. Top candidates for
automation
3. Success metrics for
Deliverables
automation
4. Project charter(s)
Workshop Day 2 Workshop Day 3 Workshop Day 4 Day 5—Off Site
Map & Optimize Build a Process for Build Automation Offsite: Draft
Processes Managing Automation Roadmap Presentation
2.1 Map process flows. 3.1 Kick off your test plan 4.1 Build a roadmap for 5.1 Draft IT automation
2.2 Review and optimize for each automation. next steps. presentation.
process flows. 3.2 Define process for
2.3 Clarify logic and automation rollout.
finalize future-state 3.3 Define process to
process flows. manage your
automation program.
3.4 Define metrics to
measure success of
your automation
program.
1. Current-state process 1. Test plan 1. IT automation roadmap 1. IT Automation
flows considerations Presentation
2. Optimized process 2. Automation rollout
flows process
3. Future-state process 3. Automation program
flows with complete management process
logic 4. Automation program
metrics
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