When created with a proper strategy toward a proper goal, automation is a huge game changer for productivity.

See the impressive progress this tech and his protégé made together.

I helped a user automate her duties and in the end I automated her out of her job

I helped someone last year automate part of their duties. She spent about 6 weeks a quarter building a report for our leadership. So about half her time was devoted to this.

The solution I built, like everything I make, used existing tools and data sources. And like everything I make, it was a little crude. A quick and dirty solution that required a couple pushes and occasional maintenance when she wanted changes or would get herself into trouble.

Their system worked, but not quite like a charm.

Unless something went wrong, it made a 6-week process into I think about an hour total. But every quarter at least one thing would go wrong.

In all cases I found the root cause was the user attempting to do something my solution wasn’t designed to do. And then she, eager to help as she is, would try to fix things herself, which would always make it worse. In all cases I simply reverted to an earlier version and she’s back in business.

My user approached a more experienced team to get something that would do an even better job. The team declined as what she already had performed adequately and they needed to focus on revenue generating projects.

So she continued using what I made and every quarter we did this dance where she runs into trouble and I bail her out. Once I got used to this I did no troubleshooting and just reverted, so it took me very little time.

She would typically spend the time my solutions saved her by prettying up the text in the presentation, helping out coworkers, doing other little manual tasks here and there for her team, and teaching herself how to use the tools I’d employed to create this solution for her.

The time comes to create a formal solution.

Then last month my user mentioned that they were still spending some weeks per quarter doing more aggregating and parsing. I told her that everything she was doing as part of that effort I could automate too. And I’d gotten experienced at using two powerful tools my company had that could handle everything she needed.

One tool could ingest, aggregate, and parse the data. The other one could create nice tables and charts and such. Combined, I could add more functionality and make her “interventions” impossible. So a stable, better product.

She’d just have to update bits of the text here and there.

I finished making it and she was thrilled. Now the quarterly report process was down to maybe a few days, a week at most. And it consisted almost entirely of updating the text in the deck and verifying it’s what people wanted.

So she had gone from spending at least 70% of her time creating this thing down to maybe 5-10%. She was looking forward to moving on from the report to other things. Which she did.

She outgrew the company and moved out of it.

I liked her. She was always trying to learn. Even when she was creating havoc, it normally made sense. And her havoc was getting more sophisticated as time went on. And I never complained about her havoc as it came from such a good place.

I wondered if this would happen. I had hoped not, but that’s how it goes. So now it’s possible that I will take over creating this report and the accompanying deck. Which has frustrated my boss.

She wants us to be the team who “builds solutions” not the team who “accumulates random duties.” She suspects the other team’s manager waited until they had someone ready to take over building the report. Which that manager now has indicated is me.

I have hopes to dodge this assignment as I am not a small to medium enterprise on the data itself, only the machine that massages it. But I suppose I’ll find out when the next fiscal quarter starts.

My backup plan is to be a nuisance to my user’s old team with endless questions, some of which will be justified. With any luck they will assign a resource to handle report creation for a few days and I continue on as a technical resource.

Here is what folks are saying.

Good points. If you’re creating value, you need to bill for that value, not just hours spent.

This is so much easier. But raw data isn’t always useful without context.

Sounds reasonable, but I doubt it would work.

Too bad they can’t work together anymore.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.