Category Archives: Workplace Automation

General IT, Software Development, Workplace Automation

4 key Data tools to advance your IT or software and data career

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Whether you are a system administrator or you write real time avionics control software for military jet fighters there are some common tools that will enable you to do your job better and handle many scenarios with ease.

They may not be part of your standard day to day tool chain but they can enhance your corporate value and situational agility.

1. Excel

No matter where you go Microsoft Excel seems to be there (or Google’s Sheets).

Excel is a swiss army knife of data manipulation, analysis, computation and modeling. There are a lot of use cases for software and IT staff where excel can be your goto tool.

I use Excel regularly to

  • Clean and normalize data
  • Rearrange data to suite some new need or analysis.
  • Summarize data quickly with Pivot Tables.
  • generate executable code for putting into other programs.
  • Automate tasks (yeah VBA ….)
  • Advanced analysis and optimizations
  • Convert data formats
  • Modeling
  • and more…

The filtering in the data view or (tables) is hard to beat for super fast analysis and getting quick answers. And the newer versions support PowerQuery/PowerPivot which gets you beyond that annoying 1 million row limit!

Technical employees would do well to maximize their understanding of this very powerful tool (and its web kin).

2. SQL (Structured Query Language)

If French is the language of love, then the language of data bases is SQL.

SQL is how you ask a database questions. In the simplest example you can select data from the table you are interested in.

SQL is harder to learn for beginners but is very powerful. With SQL you can not only select data you want from a database but you can do complex computations, transformations, data summarizations and ranking, data partitioning and joining together of data from separate tables. 

There are several very popular powerful databases that you can download for free to learn such as MySQL or Postgres

Knowing basic SQL WILL enhance your value to an organization and give you new opportunities for advancement and assignments.

3. Python and the Python Data stack

If SQL were a bulldozer then Python and the Python Data stack is a whole fleet of earth moving construction equipment.

Python is a very approachable yet extremely powerful programming language for those new to programming and is easy to learn. Python has tons of built in capability and loads of add on libraries that make the most sophisticated analysis and data mining doable.

Python can help you automate the boring stuff and make tedious data work quick and easy. And python runs on all the popular platforms like Windows, MacOS and Linux to name a few.

I use Python in many ways to automate tasks, connect disparate data sources, perform analysis, build synthetic data sets, serve web pages, send emails,   process tons of data and generally enhance my life.  I also use python do automatically generate Excel spreadsheets too.

Adding Python to your personal skill repertoire is a huge value add for your technical skills.

4. PowerBI

Microsoft PowerBI has quickly become one of the most powerful and popular Business Intelligence packages. If you need to connect to a variety of data sets and perform analysis and publish dashboards of results PowerBI is your tool.

PowerBI is Excel overdosing on steroids.

With powerful data connection tools, data modeling and programming tools and a bevy of visual presentation widgets to make impactful analytic dashboards PowerBI is a data powerhouse.

Businesses are embracing PowerBI for its power, cost and flexibility to allow data connection, gathering, computation, transformation, presentation and communication to staff, employees and customers.

Conclusion

All four of these tools are widely available and used, not expensive, and very powerful. They will definitely give your skill set a boost and your productivity too!

Small Business Growth, Technical Debt, Workplace Automation

Five simple steps to approach workplace automation

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The impact of workplace automation can be dramatic. Small business owners can improve their bottom line, improve employee morale and increase competativeness by implementing automation projects.

The real question is how do you start?

Here are 5 steps to approach implementation of automation projects in your business.

1. Look for pain points

To find good candidates for automation in your business, look for the pain points in your business processes and systems. Look for bottlenecks, repetition, manual tasks, data that doesn’t flow or reports that are manual in nature. Analyze your systems, find those that don’t integrate, where data has to be re-entered. These pain points are opportunities to automate.

On one project we had employees manually re-entering shipping information because two systems didn’t communicate the data. We were able to spend a little software development time and automate the whole process saving hours each day and improving quality.

Ask the employees for their input. You will be surprised at the insight they have to where the candidates for automation are.

2. Start small

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Analyze your business and pick small, tactical implementations you can afford. Choose projects that give your organization easy wins to build implementation skill and momentum. Projects as simple as the automation of a simple excel report, or a web site plugin to eliminate redundant data entry are excellent candidates to start with.

As the organization improves their skill at automation projects you can plan to tackle future larger, more impactful situations.

3. Involve employees

Automation projects can worry employees. It can cause fear and doubt about their future. They need to know the plan beyond what they do now. They need to see the future purpose of their position and the types for work that they will migrate to.

No one likes change when it removes tasks they measure their value to the company with. Owners and project managers need to navigate automation implementations with open and consistent communication to re-assure employees.

When I  discuss automation changes with employees,  I  stress that we should be continually trying to elevate our tasks to the highest value possible. This means delegating menial, repetitive  automate-able tasks to the machines. Automating those tasks frees up the employee to provide  higher value to the business.

One additional way to help  employees is to  provide  strengths finders, how to fascinate or similar assessments.  Assessments like these help identify strengths and latent skills. This self-knowledge  can help motivate a transition to higher value proposition tasks and assignments that align with their profiles.

4. Iterate

Many types of automation changes, especially with software based processes, can be incrementally implemented. Iteration allows organizations to try, learn and improve their processes and systems in small engagements.

Incremental implementations lessen the  organization disruption and allow employees time to learn and adapt to new processes, tools and responsibilities. When the employees see the benefit of small iterations they are motivated to continue the automation improvements.

5. Track results

Keep track of the savings your organization gains from the changes you make. Calculate the ROI. Communicate the results to the employees. Discuss ways the process of automation can be improved. Feedback this newly gained information to the next interactions of improvements. This helps  gain momentum and provides input for future decisions.

Follow these five steps and your business efficiency can improve substantially over time.

 

Small Business Growth, Workplace Automation

Just how much can workplace automation impact your small business?

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Recently McKinsey and Co. released a research article on the impact of workplace automation. In the article the authors, Michael Chui, James Manyika, and Mehdi Miremadi discuss re-framing the discussion on workplace automation from one oriented around occupations to one oriented around workplace tasks.

When we argue automation of occupations we are essentially saying that “We won’t need mortgage brokers, or bank tellers” or “Lawyers will be obsolete by use of technology”.  McKinsey’s insight allows a more nuanced discussion and application which focuses on what automation is available and how to best leverage it at a task level. Essentially it is asking what do people do best and what can automation do best and re-assigning tasks based on that mindset.

This is an approach that we have taken at my current job, looking at what tasks can be automated that were manual, repetitive, tedious or error prone. Tasks such as manual order entry, shipping data entry, video encoding and the like. By using automation to remove these tasks from the occupations they were associated with, we were able to allow those employees to spend more time focusing on exception cases, other improvements or new initiatives.

This concept isn’t something that is relying on far future technology either. McKinsey estimates that:

“…as many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.”

And this estimate doesn’t just cover the front line, lowest level employees, it goes all the way to the CEO.

In terms of economic value they further estimate that these tasks which could be automated represent

“about $2 trillion in annual wages.”

This suggests that there is tremendous latent improvement available to businesses willing to analyze and invest in appropriate automation. In fact the authors further report that:

“…the benefits (ranging from increased output to higher quality and improved reliability, as well as the potential to perform some tasks at superhuman levels) typically are between three and ten times the cost.”

Yes, that is a reported 300% – 1,000% ROI for these types of automation initiatives. That is an enormous impact on the bottom line of a small business. In my own experience I have not seen ROI that high yet, but we have definitely seen ROI levels that were very nice and justified continued investment in appropriate automation.

The authors go into much more detail about the impacts to business processes and the impact these changes have on traditionally high-wage occupations. They also hint at migrating the displaced employee time to more meaningful work and what that may look like.

The ability to automate and manage that process will become a key competitive differentiator. As the authors state:

“The magnitude of those benefits suggests that the ability to staff, manage, and lead increasingly automated organizations will become an important competitive differentiator.”

Workplace automation should be a part of every small business’ strategy discussion and planning. With objective analysis and appropriate implementation, automation can bring about significant bottom line improvements to most every business.

What is your business doing to take advantage of automation?