Part 1: Understanding Business Requirements and Automation Needs

In this part, you will learn and understand the business requirements and the need for automating them so that the system can take care of the repetitive, redundant, and automatable tasks in the backend. We will explore and see how we can take advantage of tools that we can leverage and identify these tasks that can be automated. At the end of this part, you will be able to create a functional design specification that you can use to identify what tasks shall be performed by the end users and what tasks can be automated.

We will also address some of the key challenges faced during this phase:

• Not being able to identify the right set of requirements that can be automated.
• Lack of understanding of business needs and hence not being able to create a solution / design for what to and what not to automate.
• Too much automation is due to a lack of planning.
• Not assessing the impact of existing and planned automation holistically, resulting in automation logic executing randomly.

The following chapters will be covered in this part.

• Chapter 1, Process Flows – Understanding Business Requirements
• Chapter 2, Identification of Functional Requirements for Automation
• Chapter 3, Business Process Features to Automate