The tale of Icarus flying too close to the sun is a well-known one. Warned by his father to not fly too low or too high, Icarus ignored that advice and ultimately paid the price, his wings burning due to the heat of the sun, causing him to crash into the sea and drown. The lesson of Icarus is one that Financial Services should heed when it comes to the automation of their Business Change functions, as for organisations who fall into the trap of over-automation, the risk of getting burnt by seismic events, of which we have had our fair share in the last few years, increases to dangerous levels.
The last few years have demonstrated the ferocious pace of advancements in automation technology, with AI undoubtedly the hottest topic of them all. With these advancements, many organisations have either considered or started implementing this technology, to automate processes and systems as part of a never-ending pursuit for better efficiency and output.
The Business Change functions of organisations are no exception to this trend, with some integral processes and systems, such as knowledge management, communications, and reporting, prime targets for automation. Whilst the way forward in the change delivery space undoubtedly sits with automation and advancements in tech, organisations should remember that a careful balance must be struck between human and machine when it comes to achieving successful change.
But why is striking this balance so important when it comes to an organisation’s ability to consistently deliver successful change?
If an organisation moves away from human-led change and finds itself with a Business Change function which is over-automated, its ability to consistently deliver successful change can be massively threatened. Consider the basic makeup of an automated process or system within a change project. It will rely on code and algorithms which are written to produce an intended set of outputs. This works brilliantly when project conditions are as expected by the code and algorithms.
But what if an unexpected situation or factor arises which begins to impact the project? An over-automated project may then find it extremely difficult to adapt and flex to the new conditions within which it must deliver its objectives. Of course, processes and systems can be adapted to these new conditions, but that takes time, and indeed an avoidable use of it within an environment where time is so precious.
Moreover, a reduction of the human element within a project can radically reduce innovation and engagement within the project team, two factors which play a significant part in ensuring the successful delivery of what a project set out to do.
Project professionals thrive off the opportunity to solve complex problems with other human beings. Think to the numerous times where a seemingly insurmountable problem has been overcome through the collaboration of people and their combined enthusiasm to make a success of the project. The fostering of such an environment where sufficient levels of innovation, collaboration and engagement are present could be seriously threatened by the over-automation of processes and functions.
The replacement of people by technology might seem an easy path to efficiency but organisations should be cautious. Go too far with the scale of this replacement and the project could be left lacking those human sources of collaboration and innovation which give way to the human made solutions which so often make successes of projects.
So, whilst the consequences of over-automation for an organisation’s ability to deliver successful change can be serious, it is not all doom and gloom when it comes to the introduction of automation into the change delivery world.
Indeed, when implemented at the right time and in the right place, automation can empower humans to not only consistently deliver successful change, but also enable them to develop new and unique solutions to age-old problems.
A fascinating study carried out by the Association for Project Management (APM) on the potential capabilities of AI within Project Management encapsulates the potential benefits an organisation could realise when it finds the right balance between human and machine. Posing a series of project management related questions to several natural language processing models (NLP), the GPT3 model, developed by OpenAI, was able to provide 75% of questions with answers that would give it a great chance of passing a purely theoretical project management qualification exam. Given the performance of the GPT3 model in receiving and processing project management knowledge, the study concludes that pending some further improvements in flexibility, models like this could become the central knowledge hubs of future projects.
The potential of models like GPT3 to automate menial tasks within projects, thereby freeing up time that can be dedicated to other, more critical areas of change delivery, is an exciting prospect. But organisations still need to be aware that without proper oversight of the data which NLP models draw from, the knowledge produced can quickly become unreliable.
Ensuring that NLPs only leverage an organisations’ own data will produce a much more reliable knowledge source for projects to utilise to their benefit. Without this human-led oversight, the likelihood of NLPs beginning to use data which has not been validated by the organisation can increase, jeopardising the legitimacy of these models as the central knowledge hubs of projects.
Beyond the potential use of automation as central knowledge hubs for projects, prospects have also been raised of utilising automation within the lessons learned process, which so often goes neglected within change projects. One project management tool intends to use AI to not only initiate and manage the initial capture of project lessons, but also to feed those lessons back into future projects at suitable stages where the lesson will provide the most benefit. This would not only automate the usually drawn-out and back-ended process of capturing lessons from a change project, but also intelligently insert those lessons into future projects, ensuring that time is not wasted on a problem that has been encountered before.
If organisations can strike the right balance between human and machine, delivering automation in the right way and into appropriate processes, automation can significantly empower those working within a change project to deliver success in a more efficient and consistent manner.
However, to those organisations considering the implementation of automation into their Business Change functions, I urge you to consider your readiness for automation. Diving headfirst into automation without ensuring you are ready for it can radically diminish your ability to deliver successful change, and even worse, implementing the wrong type of automation could ensure financial and operational pain for years to come.
So, I pose this question. Is your organisation ready, culturally and technically, for automation and are you considering the right type of automation to match your organisation’s nuances and readiness for automation? Organisations who fail to consider this could find themselves following the journey of Icarus a lot closer than they would like…
