“I Don’t Have Time to Automate” Yes, you Do.

What these people mean when they say they don’t have time — especially when they say they don’t have time to automate, is that they genuinely don’t want to. Perhaps people don’t believe they have the chance to automate. Whatever the case may be — automation takes time to see any benefits. However, the current mindset is focused on immediacy rather than into the future; particularly in management.

Perhaps you feel there are too many tickets to close. Or too many fires to quench. Understandably there are tickets to close, and there are always going to be fires to put out. There’s always going to be something that takes time away from a big automation project. What’s important is to be proactive about the situation. Automation is a big proactive step. This isn’t particularly favored by management — because they aren’t able to track as closely what’s going on.

Tracking Proactive Work is Hard

There’s no way to track adding something to an Excel spreadsheet by a user. If the user goes can’t access their spreadsheet they’re going to open a ticket, somebody’s going to fix it — problem solved. One resolution. Granted, you may be one step closer to achieving your ticket close goal, but if somebody is proactive about this and has made sure that the Excel spreadsheet is always there, they are just going to open it up and go about their day. They’re not going to open a ticket to say, “Hey, thanks for having my Excel spreadsheet available to me today, I appreciate that.” That’s why they’re called ‘Trouble Tickets’ and not called ‘Positivity Tickets’!

Automation isn’t an Overnight Sensation

Automation is the same thing. Here’s an example of a big automation project: deploying a server. Whenever you deploy a server; to automate this process takes a long time. Good automation projects take time to discover, to iron out all the rules, check all the dependencies and conditional logic. Then you have to build the scripts for whatever project you’re going to be doing, which takes a considerable amount of time.

Before that project can get any traction at all, it may take many months before you even get any benefit from automation whatsoever. This is the hard selling point for management that don’t…