Business services firm HGS Inc., USA’s Enhanced RPA/Bot Training focused on its 55-person robotic process automation (RPA) team. It aimed to help new developers get externally certified in Automation Anywhere (AA) and Microsoft Power Automate tools, along with creating and applying bot development tools that reinforce the training, help to onboard new developers, and enforce best practices for quality.
Program Details
The enhanced certification and bot training included:
- Automation Anywhere: Many developers complete the AA-provided courses but still are unable to pass immediately, causing project delays, discouraged employees, and increased cost. HGS created training to increase the likelihood and speed of its employees to obtain certification. The enhanced training provided more examples, real-world exercises, mentors, code reviews, and mock exam questions. It was delivered in a virtual classroom.
- Microsoft Power Automate: IT learners often must piece together information from externally developed courses, forums, documentation, video snippets, code repositories, etc. What’s missing, however, are their employers’ best practices, business context, and quality guidelines. In 2022, HGS developed and delivered a one-month, trainer-led, virtual classroom MS Power Automate training with hands-on components. Training content was designed to increase readiness for the MS PL500 external exam.
- Botathon: Trainees were divided into groups of five and assigned use cases and mentors. Each group created a bot to solve a business problem. Awards were given, and the best bots were submitted for sale. This emphasized end-to-end project management, documentation, and pitching. It created a repository of reusable code modules for future projects and gave a few senior developers the opportunity to act as technical leads to prepare for promotion.
The HGS team also developed the following bots to assist with onboarding of new/future employees and to reinforce learning on a project-by-project basis:
- Automation framework bot: This bot automatically provides a structure for completing a bot project (e.g., folders, configuration files, variables, exception handling, logs). The framework bot ensures uniformity and quality in the code, adherence to best practices, and helps in troubleshooting.
- Code review bot: A code review is one of the important tasks that needs to be completed multiple times by a technical lead to ensure there are no issues in the code. The code review requires many manual hours of labor and is prone to manual errors. HGS created a code review bot to support learning and quality.
Results
Of the 23 enhanced AA training participants, 65 percent completed Advanced Certification after the training, and 35 percent completed Master Certication as awarded by AA. Some 34 HGS participants attended the MS Power Automate enhanced training, were assessed by an external training institute, and received a completion certificate.
A code review bot checks code and enables new developers to onboard and validate faster, reduces the work of the technical leads, and helps to make HGS shine in the eyes of its clients. Five bots have been submitted to the AA bot store. Each bot sale contributes to revenue, and makes the HGS brand more recognizable in the RPA space. The team has increased RPA revenues by 70 percent over the previous year, and completed three AA RPA projects (10 automations), and two MS Power Automate client projects (25 automations).
