Be Lazy Through Automation | by David Parker
I appreciate that this is a slightly provocative title but it’s a great way to get your attention. I guess that a better title may be ‘How to remove some of the mundane elements of your day-to-day role’ but I doubt that it will get the same engagement or interest!
I think that there are great benefits in not wanting to waste time doing the same processes day after day, week after week, month after month. In effect, being lazy and not wanting to spend hours on the same things over and over. As an accountant, I’ve come across a lot of repeated processes in my time and have been very frustrated by them! They add little value in and of themselves and take away time from the work that we could be doing providing actual value to others in the business. I had one manager who wanted our team to get away from ‘spreadsheet monkeying’ and into proper analysis and reporting.
This is where the benefits of being lazy come in. If you’re able to look at a process, review it, and improve it, there are huge benefits to your role. I remember in the job above, I took on a task from someone in the team that needed two separate reports to be run then all added together (all increasing the risk of human error!), which took around half a day. I did it twice and that was enough for me to decide that there must be a better way! I was able to go into the actual reports and change them to create a single report that did everything I wanted. It took slightly longer to run compared to the previous individual reports but the output I had was ready to use and required no further manipulation. This brought the work down from half a day to around the 20 minutes it took to run the report as everything was already in the format and outputs I needed!
My Top Tips For Automation:
- Be aware of overengineering: This approach is not without its pitfalls. I love the challenge of problem solving so will always be tempted to overengineer a solution. You should do a quick cost/benefit analysis of what you need to do to make sure that the extra work to create a more automated solution is worth it. I’ve definitely in the past taken much longer on a solution with lots of fancy formulas in for a one-off report that could’ve just as easily (and much more quickly) been put together.
- Before you start, check that this is feasible: There sometimes are reasons why things are done the way they are, as frustrating as that may be! Be it a system or timeframes limitation it’s good to check with others whether your proposed approach has already been considered and is unworkable.
- Decide which tool to use: My background is primarily in Excel and I love to build templates where I can drop data in, either appending it or a new list, which updates the rest of the spreadsheet as required. Power BI is a great tool for this- if everything is set up then a simple refresh of the data (or better yet, an automated data flow) can ensure your dashboards are up to date. Be aware of the pros and cons of potential tools as you plan to ensure they can do what you want!
- Double-check your output: A final word of warning, if you do go ahead, make sure that your outputs are the same as you’re expecting from a previous process! This can take a lot of time but uncovers most of the issues in your proposed new approach, teaching you a lot.
So be lazy, be creative, learn new skills, and help out your colleagues! Start creating value by creating time to do the interesting parts of your job, not just data wrangling!
David Parker is a Data Fellowship apprentice at Multiverse based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He's writing for the Apprentice Lens as part of the Blogging Team. Here’s more about him:
"Hi, I’m David and I work as a Finance Business Partner at Homes England, a Government Agency. I'm a Charterted Accountant by training but have been getting more into data and modelling over the past few years. I'm really excited to be on the Data Fellowship course and have the opportunity to share my journey."