Remember, when automating its all about the people, you will be crossing boundaries, sometimes annoying people by accessing their systems and potentially removing some of the work they need to do in a manual process. This is why its key to get a corporate sponsor or champion that fully backs what you are trying to do and agrees with your vision. You will need their backup and help!

Tell people about what you want to do, educate the people who are involved in the current manual process, tell them about what will be changing, how it will be working and how they can help, often people can see the benefits of Automation and are keen to help achieve the goal, you will need their help.

You will be talking to many different teams in complex processes as you will want to automate tasks from end to end, this includes gaining access to systems you may not have access to at the moment, breaking down the silo-ed mentality that some teams have. Storage admins will not let you touch their baby, equally networking staff who have named and cared for each of their switches will not want anyone having access but them!

This can be a challenge which requires help from the sponsor and also enthusiasm through education of the end goal.

More Automation tips

More tips from this series created by myself and Thomas Corfmat for a session at VMworld 2013 can be found below (updated as published), if you have a login for VMworld.com you can also watch the full session here.

-Alan

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