Robotic Process Automation (RPA) promises to automate mundane, repeatable processes in business operations.
Look at the following quote from EY as it gushes about RPA,
Any technology that can reduce the costs of existing manual operations by 25% to 40% or more without changing existing systems, yet improve service and generate return on investment ( R O I ) in less than a year, can truly be described as transformational and disruptive.
No wonder RPA has arrived with a big-bang on a global scale. Businesses are eager to know more about this miracle tech. Many have gone live with good results. In this article we would however focus on the failures in implementing RPA.
At first look RPA systems are simple applications with low or no-code.
So why do many RPA projects initially fail or overrun costs?
RPA Project Implementations are Software implementations
Most RPA projects are implemented as Software projects using a mix of waterfall, agile or test-driven processes.
While these processes are battle tested, the software industry has its own documented history of failures because of unclear business requirements, losing sight of business value, poor communication, unrealistic expectations and client's misunderstandings about technology & its limitations.
So we can safely assume that RPA projects too would inherit the same problems as Software projects.
Resistance to Change
Additional reasons could be Client's resistance to change & fear of job or power loss amongst Client's employees.
While traditional software projects did disrupt ways of doing business the scale of RPA projects disruption is huge and if employees and businesses are not prepared in advance this may escalate to un-managed risks leading to delays and eventual failures.
A past anecdote I remember when working as a developer for a financial organisation where we had to write software for an Insurance back-office project. When young the whole operations plus reports were done on excel sheets. Now the business volume were higher and the organisation rightly needed to account the business with all bells & whistles. When trying to elicit requirements from the back office operator we encountered hostility and non-co-operation. At that time I rightly put it down to fear of job-loss and secretly pitied him on his nearsightedness. But today in retrospect I believe the management should have prepared him to co-operate with us and transitioned him to something better. The operator was good at excel and was proud of his skills & speed when management requested figures & reports. This was a powerful position and he rightly felt side-lined.
Another anecdote in the same organisation was when we implemented CRM for salespeople. The Sales personnel were not happy that their records, deals and other important stuff would be up for scrutiny to all. Again we found excel sheets & non-cooperation.
(Nowadays CRM is the norm though it never translated to loss of jobs unless you didn't meet or fudged your targets.)
Resistance, Non-Cooperation, hostile IT are to be anticipated in RPA projects.
Some consulting firms have already zeroed on these issues. In the next post we would discuss the various approaches to prepare Organisations to overcome these & other challenges.
