The Unsexy Reality of Workplace Automation

And why it is holding on by a thread.

Picture this:

Your name is Alex. You are a 45-year-old Senior Manager of the Reporting Team.

You send out an Employee Satisfaction Survey and get back the result of 2.7 out of 5 (your team has a group chat without you in it, they meet for a beer every Thursday and discuss your questionable business decisions).

At this point, you have two options to save the sanity of your employees and your crumbling reputation:

1. Give them a raise, pay for overworking and decrease the number of useless weekly meetings by at least 5.

OR (and this option will look much more exciting on your .pptx for the Head of Heads at the end of Q3)

2. Purchase an Enterprise license for Blue Prism and set a goal to automate 43 processes in SAP by the end of next quarter.

I started working in the Automation industry in 2018, and by 2020 I realised that I had never seen a technology with so much potential being so misused.
Given that back then AI was not yet as popular and widely talked about as now, Business Process Automation was the “The Next Big Thing”.

Rightfully so, its possibility to change the daily work of many people is enormous, and when in the right hands, it brings companies to a new level of digitalization.

When in the wrong hands, however, failed Automation projects bring companies massive financial and infrastructural costs (as well as operational chaos).

There are various reasons why an Automation project can go wrong, one of the many factors being the mindset of the project initiators. Most of the time, they have a very clear but fundamentally flawed goal in mind:

Automate as many use cases as possible, no matter the cost and long-term implications.

It is as if every process under the sun didn’t get automated in the next 10 to 14 business days, the world would collapse and there would be no tomorrow.

Sometimes, when I got a new high-potential use case in the pipeline, I would look my PM deep in the eyes and ask:

Should I start listing all the reasons why automating this is not the brightest idea, or should I wait until after lunch?

And the As-Is process would look more or less like this:

The highlighted words are the core reason why up to 50% of Process Automation initiatives fail.

Because automating chaos just creates automated chaos, nothing more.

A Story of One VBA Macro
'Q1_Final_Stats_v2_FINAL_FINAL.xlsm'

Created in 1994 by Brenda from Finance, this VBA Macro is a relic from a bygone era. The company asked me, an aspiring archaeologist, to decipher this fragile piece of code that was holding the team’s quarterly reporting process together.

Long after Brenda retired, one of the managers used the reports for the new department’s strategy. As later turned out, the reports were fundamentally wrong, which led to incorrect strategic decisions and financial costs. I interviewed the stakeholders, went through the code piece by piece, documented the whole process, and checked the numbers manually.

The error? A data handling issue.

In 2009, the company switched to a fiscal year starting in April, making Q1 run from April to June. Brenda's macro, however, was coded to treat Q1 as January to March, following the calendar year instead of the fiscal one.

This meant that:

1. All the quarterly reports since 2009 were completely off.

2. Most probably, nobody actually ever used the reports generated by the poor Brenda. That is until they nearly sank the whole department.

What other ticking time bombs lie hidden in our legacy systems, waiting to be discovered?

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The takeaway here, Alex, is that automation isn’t a cure-all. It's a powerful tool that, when misused, can cause more harm than good. Rushing into it without a clear plan and purpose can lead to disaster.

Before diving headfirst into automating every process you can find, take a step back and ask yourself:

Am I solving real problems or just creating new ones?

In the end, being a great manager isn’t about having the fanciest tools; it’s about knowing when and how to use them. Choose the path that leads to real, sustainable improvements, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll see that employee satisfaction score rise.

And who knows?

You might even get an invite to those Thursday beers.