Foundation: People
People are key to any RPA deployment. It is not all about digital workers. Without the right people involved deployments will not be as successful as they could be. This foundation looks at the skills and responsibilities needed to execute a project successfully. It will also help you to identify training needs and the relevant certifications for your team.
Skills and Responsibilities
The ROM recommends a number of skills as part of a successful RPA deployment. We provide a list of skills and an in depth look at each of the responsibilities and training options in our Skills and Responsibilities section.
Training recommendations
- Revisit training guides, tutorials and self-tests on the Blue Prism learning management system every 6 months
- Consider utilizing external training providers to augment internal training
- Ensure that all skills have a defined learning path and are equipped with the appropriate skills and knowledge
- Ensure optimum training / mentoring approach for the Blue Prism delivery and support teams is in place
- It is imperative a training platform is in place with the key being to ensure all skills identified follow an upskilling path
- Provide access to the training courses and material required for the team members to be skilled adequately in their role
- Consider how to evolve the training platform as your RPA Capability starts to mature in readiness for scale.
Find out more about Training and Certification
Think Scale
- Ensure the roles in your current model are adequate to scale to the next level of maturity
- Evaluate how you will scale the current structure and team to manage more process builds and a larger digital workforce
- Establish training paths to future-proof your team
- Plan for how you will add new roles to your model and how they will be trained
- Continually review the team structures roles and responsibilities to ensure segregation of duties is sufficient.
Human Resources (HR)
HR are an essential stakeholder in any RPA deployment. They can assist with the successful deployment of digital workers and the development of human workers.
It is recommended that:
- You engage with HR to ensure that any impact to the human workforce is well defined and planned for. This is especially important where existing teams may need to manually perform a process in case business continuity is invoked.
- HR should be involved in on-boarding the Digital Workforce. This will make it easier to gain the relevant access and accounts for the digital workers.
- HR help with cultural adoption. Deploying RPA can cause fear within an organisation. It is therefore vitally important to bring the business along with the journey and proactively drive cultural adoption.
- Utilize HR expertise to help build job descriptions, succession and training plans.
Mentoring
Mentoring is one of the most overlooked, but most fundamental elements of any RPA program. Bringing in one or two skilled and experienced resources to work alongside a new team will fast-track the abilities of the team and ensure standards are set from the beginning. The mentor approach taken early will also help avoid the most common pitfalls.
An effective mentor is someone with several years working with the Blue Prism technology. They should also be strong communicators and an advocate for the defined service standards. They may be brought in as permanent team members, or you may consider using a partner or Blue Prism resource.
Training paths
Blue Prism provide recommended certification paths for a variety of RPA skills. It is recommended that you:
- Ensure each team member has a defined certification path
- Check the Blue Prism certification paths every 6 months and update your approach as required
- Ensure experienced Lead Developers have completed the Lead Developer training path
- Consider putting all team members through the appropriate accreditation in line with their function.
Checklist
- All roles have a defined learning path and are equipped with the skills and knowledge
- Training plan is in place with the key being to ensure all skills identified follow a defined path
- Access is in place to the training courses and material required for the team members to be skilled adequately in their role
- The training plan is able to evolve as your RPA capability starts to mature in readiness for scale
- Experienced lead developers have completed the lead developer training path.
- All developers have completed the Advanced Consolidation Exercise in the Blue Prism University Online Courses
- The skills in your current model are adequate to scale to the next level of maturity
- Plans in place to train any additional roles which might be added to your model
- Regular review in place to look at team structure, skills and responsibilities to ensure segregation of duties is sufficient
- Plan in place to extend training capability internally or utilize third party trainers as you scale.
- HR engaged to define the roles and responsibilities for the human workforce and on-boarding the digital workforce
- Able to on board digital workers as you would a human (where applicable)
- RPA team have defined roles and responsibilities
- Succession and career plans in place for RPA team.
- RPA team training and mentoring of new team members is in line with expansion of team
- Regular review of training guides, tutorials and self-tests on the Blue Prism University
- Training requirements established to equip the operations team to support the workload for the digital workforce
- SME’s from the business areas are aligned and accordingly trained to support delivery where required
- Mentors are in place who can effectively mentor the RPA team.
- Define the skills and responsibilities that ensure a clear segregation of duties
- Process analysts are in place and are responsible for finding the processes and business requirements
- Someone owns the ROM Architect function and is responsible for managing the creation of the Blue Prism delivery capability
- Process controllers are in place to monitor production processes
- A technical architect is in place to act as the technical expert, acting as the liaison with other technical teams/IT.
NB: At the beginning of an RPA program, one person may operate across multiple skills.
Blue Prism University provides mature upskilling paths for all roles with formal certificates for the principal roles.