In industrial companies, automation of manufacturing processes has long been standard. In e-mail marketing, it is not only e-mail dispatch that has been automated for some years.
In both product support and project management, tools have been available for some time that help agents with support requests and automate certain processes. Whether it is to solve customer inquiries quickly and with consistent quality, to relieve agents of tedious tasks, or to reduce human error.
Automation will become a priority
Automation is becoming increasingly important in every area. Regardless of the size of the company. Global interdependencies of our economy, the resulting increase in competition. They alone make the introduction of automated processes in every company a necessary process.
Otherwise, it is hardly possible to stand out from industry peers or to fully exploit one’s growth potential. Especially not if you cannot expand as planned in economically uncertain times.
In such cases, the maximum possible must be achieved with the available resources and existing processes must be better optimized. Automation is an enormous part of this. Even employees see automation in a primarily positive light.
Graphic shows “Top 3” survey results of randstadkorrespondenten (online magazine workforce360), what employees think about the automation of their working environment. The survey already took place in 2017 among around 1200 readers.
In general, automation stands for:
- Higher productivity: even more can be achieved despite the same number of employees.
- Lower costs: due to the “more” achieved results, the value of what has been achieved increases. Whereby the costs, however, remain the same. In relation to the result effectively even decreased.
- Increased workplace safety: errors due to manual tasks are reduced. Employees (and managers) are more satisfied overall.
- Increased efficiency: employees have more time for more important (strategically high-ranking) or more meaningful tasks.
Automation in project management
Projects are becoming increasingly complex and their duration is often long. In addition, the geographical expansion to distributed teams forces managers to keep themselves more and more up to date by using modern tools and techniques.
This makes it easier to delegate, as well as to continue to manage the required volume of tasks and the necessary concentration on the essentials.
Without the right tools, it becomes more difficult to keep up with requirements in a timely manner, without stress or errors.
A project manager is no longer responsible for just one project. Colleagues with expertise are sought-after participants in various projects. Their role and function increasingly expands over the course of their company tenure. Often even beyond the IT area. Agility in such a case means reacting flexibly to new challenges.
Unfortunately, this also makes it increasingly difficult to concentrate on all tasks in the same way. Sooner or later, it inevitably ends with the use of automation tools.
Advantages of automating project management activities
- Delegating certain tasks becomes easier through the use of automation. Project managers’ work is made easier here.
- Risky or complicated processes can be handled / processed in a timely manner and less prone to errors through automation.
- Project teams can focus better on their essential tasks. Repetitive tasks (e.g. checking / completing missing data) or recurring (simple) tasks can be done automatically with a minimum of fuss.
- Complexity can be reduced and response times increased.
- Necessary escalation processes can be started promptly and problems can be solved faster.
Even the world’s leading research and advisory firm, Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT), predicted in a paper in early 2020 that by 2024, 69% of management activities will already be fully automated (Source).
Redmine Automation Plugin
We also believe that automation of processes in project management is important and necessary. The increasing number of tasks makes it necessary to provide your employees with tools to do their work conscientiously and with pleasure. Without creating additional stress through increasing workload or new activities.
For this reason, we started the development of the Redmine Automation Plugin almost a year ago. This is now officially available for purchase on our website.
Automate Procedures and tasks in Redmine
This is an extension of the Reporting plugin (required as a base), which can automate routine tasks and optimize existing data sets with the help of rules and schedules.
All information about our extensions to Redmine can be found on the Product page. For minimum requirements visit our plugin Pricing page. Plugins are available as single version or as bundle.