For this series of posts, Terri is thrilled to be joined by Brett Li of Tonkean. Brett and Terri had a great discussion on “human-in-the-loop” automation workflows a few weeks ago and are sharing three different angles on how apply such autmation in the real world. The first was about top-down and bottom-up approaches to adding automation to our work. In the second (this post), we focus on the value of having an operations role (or chauffeur) as part of the team when you add automation. The third (link to follow) will be more tailored to how individuals can add automation to their work. For all three, we’ll explicitly consider how talent, technology, and technique come together to help us reach our targets given the times we’re working in. That is, we’ll be taking a Thinking in 5T™ approach.

Value of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches to Automation

Our stake in the ground: Create automation designs and implementations with a combination of top-down and bottom-up activities.

Value From the Top:

• Opportunity to drive automation strategies from the top-down to align with overall business objectives.

• Depending on the stage of the company, ability to leverage automation to help scale growing organizations or improve efficiency in larger enterprises.

Some top-down work is necessary as many of the benefits of adding automation to our work require access to enterprise systems and data - data that individuals and teams may not be able to access without top-down support. Das Rush of Andreessen Horowitz; Oleg Rogynskyy, founder of People.ai; and Peter Lauten, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz do a nice job describing the issues of permissions in their a16z Podcast: AI in B2B.

Although top-down approaches align automation initiatives with executive buy-in and overall business initiatives, top-down approaches can fail due to a lack of understanding of how the changes affect processes at the team and individual level.

Value From the Bottom:

• The connection with employability. Research shows that crafting your work - self-designing/customizing how you do your work -  has a positive relationship with your performance and employability.

• Bottom-up approaches also allow automation to be applied at the right times and right places since teams are closer to the ground and better understand where inefficiencies lie.

Fully bottom-up approaches to automation face challenges if there is a lack of executive support that limits the resources and access available to drive meaningful change.

We need a way to connect the top-down and bottom-up approaches.

The Value of Operations Teams in Adding Automation to Our Work

The best automation strategy incorporates both top-down and bottom-up approaches. Many enterprises create operations teams that sit at the hand-off between top-down initiatives and bottom-up implementations. These teams are typically embedded in business functions, like sales ops for sales, customer ops for customer success & support, and legal ops for corporate legal teams. They deeply understand the needs of their team across people, process, and technology. They also have the knowledge and skill-sets to implement changes while having channels to obtain the buy-in necessary at the executive level.  In other words, people in operations roles act as “chauffeurs” for automation. 

Senior members of business functions like salespeople, lawyers, marketers, product owners, etc. — people who know their complex work the best — can gain great value from partnering with operations teams (see Terri’s prior post on how “middle-down” can trigger bottom-up work crafting). 

While working with many operations teams, Brett has seen many successful automation projects implemented with a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches. For example, TripActions customer operations team delivered an automation solution that helped to scale and improve customer support while simplifying the lives of support agents. Their success was based on a solution that took into account both the needs of the business and the individual employees. 

A Team-Based Approach

The reality for most of us is that the greatest value will come from a team-based approach as we apply automation in our work. Translators, chauffeurs, ops teams and all can help us improve our work -- but the teams must work in a 5T fashion. We must manage target, talent, technology, technique, adjusted for our times and context, in concert. Traditionally, technology has been implemented and supported by IT, but there can be a gap between IT and understanding the business and people on the specific teams. Gaps can lead to business teams circumventing IT’s process and finding their own solutions -- shadow IT. We need teams, not tugs-of-war.

Take-Away

From the bottom up: Seek out the automation gurus in your organization or professional network. Then, work with them (i.e., don’t surrender your work crafting -- you need to be involved). Don’t just focus on the automation/technology, but also keep track of opportunities across technique and your talent -- Think in 5T as noted above. Consider these crafting efforts as a negotiation. You’ll have a variety of stakeholders to consider as you map out the issues and possible outcomes of the “deal.”

From the top down: Build-in infrastructure to support and connect with innovation from the bottom-up. The financial software company, Intuit, can serve as a guide. When they wanted to involve the whole organization (not just R&D) in innovation, they created a role called “innovation catalyst.” Great Harvard Business Review piece here describing Intuit’s approach.

Let us know in the comments below if you’d like more detail on how to work both top-down and bottom-up as you innovate using automation.