Kitt Holohan, Graduate Management Trainee, shares a summary of her 4-month placement with IT Services, in which she showed endless enthusiasm and appetite to help move automation forward at the University. Best of luck in your new placement Kitt, we’ll miss you!
As a first year Graduate Management Trainee on the University’s 2-year rotational Graduate Management Training Scheme, I’ve spent the past 4 months with the Business Partnering team. The main focus of my placement has been finding opportunities across the University for automation and efficiency enhancement, contributing to the first pillar of the Digital Strategy: Increasing University efficiency.
What’s the project all about?
The automation project has involved finding and prioritising processes suitable for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – which is where we use tools such as LEAPWORK to follow the steps of a repetitive process more quickly and accurately than a human could. Some teams may also find that ServiceNow or Microsoft Power Automate could improve the efficiency of their processes.
Sharing IT knowledge
I’m not from an IT background, so I spent a few weeks meeting with individuals and teams across the department to gain an understanding of how IT Services works, improving my knowledge of automation itself, and learning about the available tools. I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by people who are not only highly knowledgeable about all things technology, but who have taken the time to patiently share this knowledge with me and answer even my most basic questions!
Conversations across the University
The next step was to begin the conversation with teams across the University: presenting the project and encouraging teams to submit proposals for processes they would like to be considered for automation.
After these presentations, many areas asked for follow up meetings to discuss processes they’d thought of as a team; I was often supported in answering these questions by members of the Business Partnering team or the College IT managers, amongst others. While there were a few teams who did not feel ready for automation, or who did not have the capacity to commit to the collaborative effort needed, the vast majority were extremely keen; to date, we’ve received 50 process proposals.
Prioritising opportunities
After Easter, I began working with the Business Partners and the QA team to start narrowing down which processes are suitable for automation – prioritising high value opportunities, as well as simpler processes to showcase automation and get people excited about the possibilities.
In my final week I started initial conversations with the teams across the University who had processes in these categories.
Key challenges and learnings
Although automation has the potential to save the business thousands of hours, some areas are currently so stretched that they have struggled to find the time to even consider automation. Consequently, a few areas have not been able to make the most of this opportunity in the short time I have spent on the project. As we are still near the start of the University’s automation journey, I am confident these teams will be ready to automate some of their processes over the next few years.
It’s been encouraging to see how open teams have been to the (sometimes intimidating!) idea of automation; as we can see from all the submissions we’ve received, there is real enthusiasm across the University about it. I hope that this work can contribute to the University’s overall approach to automation for the future.
Next steps
Phase 2 of the project will be led by another Graduate Management Trainee, Poppy Aston, who is joining IT Services for the next 4 months. Poppy will be working to ensure the automation of the prioritised processes is delivered successfully, in partnership with the process owners. It’ll be exciting to see what we can achieve by September!