Being one of the top 50 largest FMCG/Consumer goods companies in the world, our client, a global hygiene and health company, conducted a global initiative to digitize its operations. This initiative comprises an extensive list of technologies and sub-areas of focus, amongst which Robotic Process Automation plays a key role in automating manual and highly repetitive processes and tasks from the business lines.

All digital transformations require vast support across the organization, especially in such a high-profile company.  This RPA initiative became a joint venture between the client’s Global Business Services team and the Central IT Service team.

The Global Business Services team took on the responsibilities of increasing awareness of process automation across the business functions, probing the organization for automation opportunities, and defining the requirements of RPA implementation.

The Central IT Service Team was responsible for delivery new automations in accordance with industry best practices and maintaining these automations in support and operations using a DevOps framework.

Challenged by the growing demand for Robotic Process Automation services from the business functions and the increasing complexity of maintaining RPA Operations due to high number of processes in production (+60), Roboyo was selected as the pure play partner to join the client in the ambition automation journey. As such Roboyo supported the client in:

1. Selecting the right Model FOR Scale Delivery – “the Delivery Pod”

The modular nature of the pod offers the possibility to augment delivery power by additional another profile with a clear division of roles and responsibilities.

The Delivery Pod is one of several delivery team structures offered by Roboyo which aims at providing the broad expertise and ability to rapidly scale for acceleration during delivery of automations through agile delivery. Instead of a process per process engagement, the Delivery Pod is a model where a fixed cohort of experts work as a dedicated team to support the journey of our client base for a large set of automations and support the day-to-day activities of the client that very often go beyond pure development (e.g. change management with the business functions).

In this example, the primary goals of our client were to integrate a group of Blue Prism experts already familiar with delivering projects resulting in a short ramping up period, all while adhering to the already existing best practices for RPA development. The model also had to be capable of sustaining changes in the demand for RPA across the organizations, so the flexibility to scale up or down the number of resources.

Once the Delivery Pod became the selected model for our client, two scoping aspects become imperative to align: Size & Location.

Sizing the Pod

Delivery Pods can be structured in different ways, depending on the number of resources required.  Broadly speaking, the Pod is usually composed of 4 key capabilities that can be spread or concentrated across different resources:

Our client opted to kick-off the cooperation with Roboyo with a delivery pod of 3 members composed of a Technical Project Manager playing simultaneously the role of Project Manager and Automation Lead, a Senior Blue Prism Developer and a Blue Prism Developer both playing the roles of RPA Developers.

Locating the Pod

Another important factor in selecting a delivery pod is in the availability of onshore vs offshore resources.  In the case of our client, the selected offshore model allowed the Roboyo delivery pod to work completely remotely, in tandem with our client.  Between both organizations on this project, we sat across four different countries.  As a global organization, Roboyo helped the client navigate this remote initiative by designing a model suitable for their financial and communication ambitions.  This became most vital when the Covid-19 crises meant that the client’s company would be working remotely as well.

The Covid-19 crisis has caused companies across the globe to collectively undergo a massive change to typical office environments.  The offshore model has proven widely successful, especially during these unprecedented times.  We recommend it to clients provided there is strong cooperation between the Technical Project Manager and the client’s RPA lead, needed to make the bridge between the Roboyo developers and the business functions from the organization.

In the case of our client, the Technical Project Manager carried the following responsibilities:

2. Ramping up the team and learning ways of working together – “Onboarding the Pod”

The benefit of having a fixed team for a project is that the team learns how to cooperate and how to excel in the client’s environment. Therefore, ensuring a period of onboarding where best practices are discussed and shared among the team is key.

3. Functioning as a single team to deliver fast – “Running the Pod”

The nature of IT projects often shows that many process automation initiatives are subject to technical obstacles, such as delays in achieving infrastructure and application access or requests for additional testing requirements. The delivery pod model allows many of these delays to be absorbed by each member having multiple workstreams in parallel to maximize resource output.

In the case of this client engagement, the Delivery Pod was able to consistently work across multiple workstreams in parallel to ensure efficient, on-time delivery of the highest quality automations.  It was very common that each member of the delivery pod had 1 process under development, 1 process under extended User Acceptance Test and 1 process stabilizing in Hypercare all simultaneously.  This speaks to the high degree of professionalism and expertise that comes with working with a Roboyo delivery pod.

Another key advantage of the Delivery Pod is the inclusion of the Pod members in Support & Run Operations. By exposing the delivery pod to Operations, the team members become familiar with the struggles and commons incidents of maintaining RPA automations live and stable which ultimately ends up being reflected in higher quality solution designs that are prepared to serve the business functions.

In our example, each developer of the Delivery Pod rotated in weekly supported shifts with the clients’ delivery team to support a total of more than 60 automations live in RPA Operations.

In sum, the Delivery Pod model is an extremely agile team structure capable of delivering and running automation projects at scale while ensuring the business functions have their best experience possible through automation.