Implementation

Bot Maintenance

Introduction

Bot maintenance is primarily geared towards scheduling and monitoring the bots to ensure that bots continue to execute as scheduled. The focus of the maintenance team is to proactively identify any adverse scenarios and provide a quick fix to any issues that come up. There are three main stages of bot maintenance as they move to production:

  • HyperCare
  • Production Support
  • Minor enhancements

HyperCare

This is the first stage of production migration of bots. First few runs of bots are executed under close watch in collaboration with process SMEs. Below are some of the key points about the approach to HyperCare:

  • Duration of HyperCare phase is decided in collaboration with process SMEs during the project planning phase. At minimum first 5 runs of the bots are run under HyperCare mode
  • Schedule of HyperCare sessions is planned with process SMEs to ensure their availability in case of any issues during or after the bot execution
  • Bots are manually executed from production control room with process SMEs actively involved during the execution of the bots
  • Any changes or fixes that are required during the HyperCare phase are taken care by the development team
  • Explicit review & signoff is required from process SMEs after every bot execution

Support

Production Support team has the explicit responsibility to make sure that bots are scheduled and monitored in accordance with plan agreed with process SMEs. This ensures proper controls are in place to avoid any unauthorized bots running in production. Production support team is responsible for:

  • Scheduling and monitoring bots in production
  • Co-ordinating with IT infrastructure teams to ensure availability of automated business processes and resolution of any issues that affect execution of bots
  • Publish a dashboard with bot execution results
  • Co-ordination with business SMEs for process exceptions or failures of bots
  • Maximize the utilization of runners (licenses) by scheduling the processes effectively

Minor Enhancements

It is inevitable that processes or underlying systems that bots access will go through some change and the bots will need to be updated to make sure that they continue to deliver the business value that they were programmed for. Production support team is equipped to handle these enhancements on a pro-active basis through detailed documentation and hand over meetings.

  • RPA production support team needs to stay in touch with process owners and application owners to know ahead of time when these systems change
  • Any upcoming changes to the process or underlying application interface are discussed with process SMEs and planned for proactively.
  • It is important to realize that bots are sensitive to certain changes that in normal IT application are considered low impact. As part of communication plan for RPA program it is made sure that application owners and process owners are aware of the type of changes that bots are sensitive to. For example, a change in login page of an application might not be a big change in general because users intuitively know to enter credentials when a login window appears but for a bot it is a change and this minor change needs to be planned for when the underlying system is expected to change.
  • Production support team works with IT support or process SMEs to assess the change and creates an effort estimate to decide whether a given change is a simple fix, a minor enhancement or a fundamental change in the process that needs to be treated as a major enhancement.
  • Changes deemed as minor enhancements are assessed and prioritized based on their criticality in collaboration with SMEs.
  • Production support team takes up the development of these changes based on the prioritization.
  • Bot enhancement process to develop and test the bots is followed before the updated bots are moved to production.