How Crowdsourcing Transformed a Stalled Automation Project into 30,000 Hours of Annual Savings

Uh, can I, can I take a different example for this?

OK. So, um, in my current organization, um, you know, I, uh, I was observing lots of opportunity of automation in, in our client services operations. So, uh, my day to day duties actually, uh, you know, allows me to collaborate a lot with the operations leads. And during this collaboration, I realized that there is a definitely a, a, a scope of automation for various, uh, processes. Now, uh, as a part of that, you know, I, I set a goal for myself that I will do the automation. I would probably bring in some efficiency for my uh client services and ultimately for my business and to the end customers. But, uh, I wanted to do more analysis. So, I started having conversation with operations leads to understand what kind of processes these people are doing. I also spoke with them on, you know, where you guys are spending more time, what kind of those processes are, what upstream, downstream, what manual activities you guys are doing. As part of this, uh, you know, I realized that there are 50+ processes which can be automated. Uh, if this could have been automated, probably it could have turned out to be a 30,000 hours per year of savings. So I, I thought of presenting this idea to my CIO. Uh, when I presented my idea, uh, there was a, it was well received, but then they said that there, there are no resources, there's no budget. So you cannot, so if you want to do it, you figure it out. Um, and then, you know, I, I, because I wanted to do it, I wanted to do it for, for my business, for my organization. I started thinking how I can do differently here, uh, what best approach I can take, which is unusual in nature. Uh, and, and then I decided, I, one idea came into my mind, uh, which is, uh, I named it as crowdsourcing. So, uh, crowdsourcing within the team and within the organization. So my idea was basically just like crowdfunding works, you know, uh, collecting the pennies from different, different people, instead of that, collecting efforts from different, different, uh, people within the team, uh, within the organization. And from the people who are ready to volunteer and give their best, uh, who are ready to come out from the shell. So, I went ahead with this idea. Uh, I, I took help from various teams to build out a SharePoint, uh, form where I can put in my request, where people can see in the request and can they volunteer. And the, uh, result was tremendous. Uh, I never thought I would be, you know, achieving this tremendous result. So lots of people volunteered. Uh, without any resource, without any proper budget, I was able to, I was able to, uh, save around 27,000 hours a year. Uh, that too without any proper project, uh, and that too only through crowdsourcing. So I feel. Uh, this crowdsourcing approach, which I took was unusual, uh, probably not from an industry standpoint, but when we think from an organization standpoint doing crowdsourcing project that took over 9 months and doing 27,000 hours a year of saving, uh, and this, this reflects to around 10 to 15 FTEs, full-time employees. So I felt that this is definitely unusual approach which I took.

See, I, I, as I say, right, I drive this kind of things in my past organization. So, um, from my first example, I said that I, I reached out to various Center of Excellence and I asked for loan resources. So the loan resources, uh, concept was basically, you know, you have the funding, and you go ahead and uh ask for resources, and they, they, they loan you for 1 month, 2 months kind of thing. Here, I wanted to do the similar kind of thing, but it was from this, this idea was from motivation and from, uh, you know, a kind of volunteerism for the company, for the organization, for the operations. So, I wanted to, I was sure the way I was energetic about bringing in some efficiency for our organization from 2700 people which we have in uh in in our organization, there will be someone who is like me who will be bringing in those kind of uh discipline and ideas. And I just wanted to try it. I just wanted to try that if I can bring in 10 people, that's sufficient. And uh, uh, one thing is, uh, you know, I, I actually proposed a budgeted project this year for 2021.5 a million of budget is approved for this project. I'm now setting up a team of 4 members which will be dedicated for this.

Yeah, so, uh, I just wanted to do it as a quick turnaround, uh, where, uh, you know, once uh people signs in for some of the processes, uh, you know, I simply, uh, I, I, I wanted to spend not much of the time in, um, you know, going through the processes and going through all the kind of approvals and all. So I wanted to try it as quick as possible. So, I prioritize the processes, uh, which can be automated. So as I said, 50+ processes can be automated. So I prioritize first two of them. Which can bring in, let's say, which was a very easy effort to implement, but then which was bringing in high level of uh efficiency gain. So I targeted those low uh low hanging fruits first with those kind of volunteers. And uh with the kind of success I got, uh, I, I thought of going ahead, making it, uh, you know, taking more resources, uh, volunteers and doing it. Though I was not able to achieve all 50+, I automated around 13+ uh processes.