Control Room Best Practice
The Control Room and the Controller fulfill two distinct objectives:
- Supporting the Business and Operations
- Supporting the IT and Development teams
These objectives are not mutually exclusive and depending on the maturity of the organization, some goals are valued higher than others.
Consider your Organization’s maturity and align with outstanding needs.
The Control Room provides a single point of interaction between the Business and Operations with the Digital Workforce. As such it has the following goals:
Monitoring:
- The Controller monitors that processing is being done by the Digital Workers
- The Controller informs the Business if there are any cases to be reprocessed manually
- The Controller monitors if the Digital Workforce is operating as expected
Reporting:
- The Controller supports reporting requirements by executing ad-hoc reports
- The Controller ensures that regular reports are produced as per business requirements
Analytics:
- The Controller gains insight to the inflow model of the work cases
- Model Blue Prism license utilization and identify extra capacity that is underutilized.
Supporting New Automations:
- Operation Handbook Review
- New Automation Warranty Support
- Troubleshooting Support
Supporting Upgrades and Infrastructure Changes:
- Schedule and Resource Management tasks owned by the Controller
Administration of the Environment Variables:
- Credentials and the Environment Variables
Common Control Room Challenges
Solutions should be easy to control:
- Solution Designs need to ensure that a process is easy to set up and run and digital workers are well utilized
- The run time requirements of a solution should be captured as part of the definition phase. Blue Prism provides a Functional Requirements Questionnaire to capture this information.
- Work polling logic should be part of the solution itself rather than managed in Blue Prism schedular
- The Blue Prism portal has examples of Dynamic Scheduling and work polling solutions
- Every project should include handover and training from the development team to the controller team, helping them to set up and support the solution. Blue Prism has an Operational Handbook template to help with this.
What is your Blue Prism Alerting mechanism?
- The Blue Prism solution should contact the controller team when there is something needing their attention
- Methods of sending alerts include: Blue Prism Alerts, emails, internal workflow/worklist system, MI platform such as Splunk
This is a development methodology issue:
- Best practice exception handling should ensure terminations are very rare
- Testing strategy should ensure all scenarios have been tested against production
- Change management should reduce change of unexpected events in production causing terminations
The business remains responsible for the business process.
- The business process owner needs to ensure:
- The digital worker is trained correctly
- SLAs are being met
- Exceptions are worked
- To do this the business needs:
- Regular and accurate MI
- Passing exceptions onto the human workforce to complete should be an automatic part of the solution
- Never aim for zero exceptions. Plan for and expect exceptions rather than waste time aiming for perfection.
- A lot of customers use the 80/20 rule or agile vertical slicing rather than delivering everything.
- Process improvement should be planned rather than ad-hoc
Top Tips
Here are some tips for the daily management of your digital workers and the management of your internal customers -
- Ensure the business teams teams are aware of and involved where necessary in platform maintenance
- Ensure auto-archiving of the session logs is used
- Ensure solutions are clearing down work queues
- Liaise with technology owners to ensure updates, maintenance and testing are planned
- Use the communities portal - https://community.blueprism.com/home
Visit Blue Prism Help online to find more information on the latest product features, troubleshooting advice and 'how to' guides.