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Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?
E.g. Onboarding of new employees, expenses, security, etc..
- mindcrime 10y agoI'm working on some marketing automation stuff. Automatically sharing blog post links to Twitter, etc.
- daw___ 10y agoIf your blog provides an RSS feed then there are many options to choose from to achieve autoposting to Twitter, first two that come to my mind: https://dlvrit.com/ https://dlvrit.com/ https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter
- mindcrime 10y agoYep. I'm more inclined to roll my own right now though, since I have some very specific ideas I want to implement and some other use cases to incorporate. The biggest problem lately has been time. I started down this path sometime last year, but have been letting it sit on the back-burner for a while, in favor of focusing on higher priority tasks. sigh
- macpatel 10y agoWhat kind of uses cases you have ? I think buffer,hootsuits like paid apps should be enough to do whatever you want.
- superquest 10y agoFiring the CEO
- jonwachob91 10y agoYou think you can do a better job as the CEO than the CEO you have now? Or you know someone that you think can do a better job?
- akerro 10y agoNo, he thinks he could write a script to fire his CEO, so they don't have to do it every day.
- ythn 10y agoAt my work we just have a Jenkins job that fires the current CEO first thing in the morning
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- yev 10y agoDude, simple cron job is enough.. 30 8 * * * /fire/ceo/now
- ratsbane 10y agoI'd make it event-driven. /usr/sbin/hire --ceo starts a setTimeout(function() {`/usr/sbin/fire --ceo`}, 'INTERVAL 60 DAY') (And that is a weird bit of pseudocode, indeed.)
- cellularmitosis 10y agoRidiculous. This is obviously a job for systemd.
- yellowapple 10y agoThat's what the last CEO said before we fired him.
- arpit 10y agoExpense tracking
- silasb 10y agoI've been using ledger-cli [1] for this. It takes time to reconcile accounts, but I've been going strong for the last couple months. [1]: http://www.ledger-cli.org/ http://www.ledger-cli.org/
- Afforess 10y agoSecurity. 90 day passwords, with multiple internal sites & servers each needing unique ones? I don't understand why we don't have automated client certificates and auto-generated ssh keys.
- Artemis2 10y agoAre you referring to one of these? https://github.com/Netflix/bless https://github.com/Netflix/bless http://gravitational.com/teleport http://gravitational.com/teleport https://www.scaleft.com https://www.scaleft.com We have actually developed such a service for internal usage (could not use any of these three because of compliance requirements), it works very well.
- fortyfivan 10y agoI'm from ScaleFT, thanks for the mention. I'd be curious to hear more about what specific compliance requirements we couldn't meet.
- herghost 10y agoThe 90 day password thing is pretty universal in my experience, but to be fair NIST has only very recently changed their recommendation on this so you can understand business' reticence to ease off on it. As for the multiple internal sites and servers thing...well, from a security point of view I totally agree with the requirement for separate passwords but it sounds like you're in need of a proper identity management solution - which isn't really fair to blame security for - it's not usually the security function who are going to implement and own this sort of thing.
- ajford 10y agoI'm SO glad NIST put out that new recommendation. I really hate the whole 90 day thing. Argued for days (friendly argument) with one of my co-workers who was partly responsible for our implementation of the 90 day rule on how it wasn't necessarily better, and often lead to stupid passwords with very dumb/simple patterns. Even with the new NIST rec, I can't get him to back off on it, so sadly we'll be stuck on that for a while.
- beaver6969 10y agoSomeone looking for start up ideas?
- ry4n413 10y agomy first thought
- charlieegan3 10y agoLooks like it - have you got any?
- beaver6969 10y agoNot yet - will hopefully pick up a few from this thread!
- rrhyne 10y agoYou should automate the discovery of startup ideas by posting a thread here every few days.
- tootie 10y agoI'd automate startup idea creation.
- skyyler 10y agoI'd love to take the time to change the way our IT department functions. They don't automate anything. They don't virtualize. They don't believe in rack mounted servers. We have 30 tower servers sitting on a specially built shelf, taking up most of a room. It's absurd but I have so much other shit to do that I can't justify completely disrupting their entire workflow
- jordanwallwork 10y agoOh man I feel this
- SonicSoul 10y agothe way we solved it was getting the COO to approve us taking ownership of infrastructure and transitioning into AWS. That way we have a pretty flexible license where we can spin up servers and manage them ourselves. Certainly time overhead but at least now we don't have to email and pray. This also sends a strong message that if they don't try hard enough they can lose projects and therefore their worth at the company
- wslh 10y agoI wonder how the organization puts limits to the AWS usage. For example, do you need approvals for increasing the AWS usage? Is there a limit for those approvals that require a new contract with Amazon?
- SonicSoul 10y agowe're not a huge company so don't need to worry about that too much. Also we're migrating our production servers from Sunguard to AWS which is 4x cheaper, so we're well ahead on expenses
- nurettin 10y agoNeccessity is the mother of invention. Do you have a need to distribute your job queues to multiple servers? Do you need multi-master db replication? Do you load balance? Do you need to instantiate db backups to recover/inspect data? Do you backup snapshots of every server? The more these things happen, the more likely is your IT to yield and buy rack servers
- hentrep 10y agoI work in pharma, and our biggest bottleneck is drafting and executing service agreements and statements of work with new vendors. A system to facilitate this workflow would be amazing (document templates, a queue for requests with weekly status updates, etc.) Of course there is manual work done by Legal that can't be easily automated, but that is just one component of the bottleneck.
- kmartin 10y agoHi! My name is Kaitlyn and I am with LogicGate. We will be able to help you streamline your process. LogicGate is a flexible software solution, which empowers you to create highly controlled processes to automate and track your activities with new or existing vendors. If you are currently using excel, emails and share drives to manage these activities, LogicGate can help automate, centralize and streamline your process. Rather than shoehorning your process into expensive out-of-the-box software solution, or relying on Corporate IT, LogicGate enables you to take control of your risk thru a drag and drop interface. I would love to show you a demo of our product. What is your direct contact information? I look forward to connecting! Kaitlyn Martin 414-517-9409 kaitlyn.martin@logicgate.com
- robodale 10y agohentrap - msg or email me. I've been itching to create a new project that also solves a huge/real pain. I'd really like to hear your workflow steps in detail. Here's a temp email I setup if you want to reach out: hn@robodale.33mail.com (removed public mailinator email per mbrookes advice)
- robodale 10y agoI should also add that my wife is a clinical pharmacist who regularly creates infectious disease drug protocols for multiple 'big pharma' companies. Pretty sure she can help me round out any domain knowledge gaps I might have.
- mbrookes 10y agoYou guys realise that mailinator is public? Dale, I can see your email address. I highly recommend 33mail.com instead - it has a pretty generous free tier: http://33mail.com/rj37w3 http://33mail.com/rj37w3. (Not associated, just a long-time user and happy paying customer.)
- Johnny555 10y agoI'd get rid of the manual process of driving to the office every day and replace it with collaboration tools to let people telecommute full time. We actually use such tools, but have a "no remote workers" policy. Occasional work from home is fine, just not full time.
- BjoernKW 10y agoCan you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something like this I like to challenge it by the following: Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier. If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal presence. Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover potential for optimisation.
- beachstartup 10y ago> Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? there is no reasoning behind these policies. it's just someone's decision. you'd be surprised at how much business 'logic' is really just arbitrary choices. the way to fix it is to quit and work for someone/some place that has a sane policy. these social shifts take decades to fully manifest because old rich people don't like changing their way. because they're old, and they're rich. why should they? they're old and rich, remember? you do you, don't try to fight against what can't be changed.
- pc86 10y agoI was with you until you turned it into some weird nonsense about class and age for no reason. For thousands of years the majority of work occurred in collocation with other people doing the same work as you. Now we have technology that allows for remote work and there are a lot of companies taking advantage of it. Over time the default will become remote if the specific job allows it. I imagine at some point beyond the default will become remote regardless of the task. But you can't expect people to change the entire organizational structure of their business overnight "because Slack!"
- migueltarga 10y agoCoffee Maker
- pknerd 10y agoThis guy already did this: http://www.businessinsider.com/programmer-automates-his-job-2015-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/programmer-automates-his-job-...
- migueltarga 10y agoYup, but I'll need to automate my mug too..
- Raphmedia 10y agoCaffeine pills dispenser at your desk. Everyday at 9h it gives you a pill.
- pknerd 10y agoA developer would like to do welcome such kind of automation http://interestingengineering.com/programmer-automates-job-6-years-boss-fires-finds/ http://interestingengineering.com/programmer-automates-job-6...
- kzisme 10y agoReminds of me this post/story: https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts
- xiaoma 10y agoDealing with US banks from abroad. It took an absurd amount of effort to get an account opened and after over a month, I still don't have debit cards.
- chadgeidel 10y agoI'm pretty sure this is a "feature" not a "bug" due to regulation. I'm not saying it's bad or good (I understand why).
- pknerd 10y agoI automated entire process of applying jobs on Glassdoor by using Python and Selenium. Already sold to a few students.
- crystalPalace 10y agoThis sounds interesting and potentially very useful. Would you mind sharing a link to your project or giving a more in-depth description?
- pknerd 10y agoyou may contact me via email given in my profile
- shortoncash 10y agoShowing up to work.
- lucb1e 10y agoI'm assuming this is a joke. Otherwise, let me know (and perhaps elaborate on what you mean) and sorry for the downvote.
- WillKirkby 10y agoI interpreted it as "commuting is a repeated manual process, and thus should be possible to automate"
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y agoThere is a telepresence robot that carries an ipad. It won't do military duty though; I asked.
- bhaavan 10y agoBrowsing reddit.
- slowm5 10y agotranscribing real time notes
- notwhereyouare 10y agoI actually recently mostly automated refund calculations. it's not fully complete, but it's in the verification stage
- jasikpark 10y agoCleaning up and organizing data for processing.
- BjoernKW 10y agoCan you elaborate? There are plenty of data cleansing and processing tools. Things like formatting errors can easily be fixed automatically. Things like "Human erroneously put a string in a date field in Excel and exported it to CSV."? Not so much. Errors like that often require bespoke solutions.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rch 10y agoPhone screens, for recruiters and applicants. Basically I want both sides to be faithfully represented by conversational AI, inclusive of demeanor, domain knowlege, and general aptitude.
- deedubaya 10y agoShameless plug of a tool I built which might help you with this, especially if you're hiring developers. It'll automatically research the applicants who apply to your open position and collect github profiles, repos, and do it's best to rate them appropriately. https://www.hireloop.io https://www.hireloop.io
- btown 10y agoThe real problem with phone screens is that unless you (as a recruiter) trust an unbiased third party to do phone screens at the level of rigor that you would do them yourself (rather than being incentivized, as recruiting agencies often are, to try to maximize the number of candidates they give to you), you have to do phone screens yourself with every candidate, requiring NM conversations. If you do solve that problem of trust, then you just need K(N+M) conversations, where each recruiter and each candidate establishes a relationship with one of K third parties, wherein the recruiter is notified about the candidate iff the candidate passes the third party's screens. https://triplebyte.com/ https://triplebyte.com/ is trying to be such a third party, establishing trust with YC alumni; there are likely others. From a friend going through the process as a candidate, it seems that they have a high level of rigor and are placing him in good later-stage interviews.
- 10y ago
- beat 10y agoA related question, for my own interests... how able do you feel to automate things at work? If you find a tool that can automate a severe pain point, can you bring a vendor in for a demo? Can you get a budget or get a manager to pay for automation tools? As a founder about to hit the market with an automation tool, I'm very curious about the roadblocks and resistance that engineers perceive about bringing in tools that can save a lot of pain and money.
- btown 10y agoIt's generic advice, but: Make sure you're solving the manager's pain point, not the low-level employee's (i.e. "this gets the information/service to you with a higher guarantee of quality and always at your fingertips" rather than "this saves your employee a lot of stress"), and make sure you're marketing to the manager, not just the low-level employee. And if you get lower-level employees as leads, make sure they have the ammunition (white papers, etc.) so they can escalate to their managers in terms of solving their managers' pain points.
- beat 10y agoThanks. I've been thinking about that and how to present it. It should significantly reduce the duration of downtime incidents, which is a strong sell point if I can phrase it right, but I feel like my best sales force could be senior/lead engineers who want to make their lives easier. White papers are a fine idea!
- DrJokepu 10y agoActually, if you really want to score some office politics brownie points, you should try to solve the manager's manager's pain points!
- beat 10y agoI'm thinking of focusing on downtime and shortening recovery time from failures as a marketing angle. It's not the only problem I'm trying to solve, but it seems like a solid sell for management's pain points. Whether or not they care if their engineers are miserable, they care if they're losing a thousand bucks a minute on a down system.
- Pica_soO 10y agoRobotics & PLC Programing: Automate DEA state creation from CAD-Cell Descriptions, state-transfers and all-state-covered-automated-proofing- im so sick of all those forgotten states and the blame that usually gets shifted towards the moving actors aka robots.
- thedonkeycometh 10y agoI've recently got into robotics, can you explain what you mean?
- jononor 10y agoIs the program based on finite state automata/machines?
- blakesterz 10y agoOnboarding of new customers. I feel like we must do this different than most places because I've not been even able to find a good system to even track the steps and things I do to get them set up and started. I've tried just about every task and project manager out there, most of them were good enough, but nothing was ever perfect. Using Basecamp now, has proven to be "good enough" so far (support has been perfect though). I feel like a bunch of this should be able to be automated with something that already exists.
- jasonallen 10y agoI'm confused by what you mean. I'd argue that onboarding new customers should be your core competency, the focus of your main product. What am I missing?
- devopsproject 10y ago> What am I missing? The human element. We make an application that makes use of folder on a network share. One of the developers here types up instructions each time we install a new site. If the customer has trouble or opts to have our help, they will connect remotely to create a folder and some sub folders. This takes anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour if they have trouble connecting remotely. I mentioned in a developer meeting that we should create an install script for the network folders. It would save the company hundreds of hours or work. One developed asked how I would do it. A generally competent developer, who has worked with files and folders for many years, asked how we could deliver a program to create folders. I nearly walked out (and we still dont have a 4 line script to create the folders we need)
- blakesterz 10y ago>> I'd argue that onboarding new customers should be your core competency, the focus of your main product. I suppose that's true, in a way. We host open source stuff for stuff, we support people, we do lots of stuff, some of it is automated, and some of it isn't. I was just saying a larger part of getting the new customers in production would be good to have more automated and I've not yet found an easy way to do that. I do like the idea of that being a core competency, though not quite a focus of the main product.
- kylixz 10y agoAs my company grows 50+ our DOO is failing at tracking who's working what and when. We use JIRA and have timekeeping but don't use either for resourcing. Also the company has 10 independent projects. I'd love to have some tool besides a spreadsheet or hearsay about upcoming work and who's doing it.
- codemac 10y agoI'd love to hear about various solutions for this as well. So many tools are so heavy weight, and others are too lightweight.. and everyone ends up with something JIRA/Bugzilla + spreadsheets and reports.
- kylixz 10y agoAgreed. One thought I had was to just toss project names into Trello columns and move people around as a starting point for management.
- codemac 10y agoDon't be afraid to do the next least janky thing. Run with it. It's like David Allen with GTD: If you can't do it with paper, you don't understand your process enough yet. A manual process that is well understood can be well automated, an undefined process will struggle as automating something while also defining something always ends being a huge long project. If you can mentally model how to do it in trello, then do it, and come back to the automation step once you see it working (they have an API, you can get there). Good luck!
- ryanworl 10y agoAre you talking about the process of assigning tasks for people to complete, having visibility into what is currently being worked on, or having visibility into what was done recently? Or some combination of the three? I'm guessing you not talking strictly about organizing the tasks and projects themselves since there are a million tools for that.
- brazzledazzle 10y agoThis isn't really what you were looking for so feel free to flag me as off topic since I'm kind of piggybacking on it. I feel like a lot of people at bigger companies know what needs to be done, how to do it, want to do it and sometimes have even purchased something to accomplish it but we have the hardest time getting traction. I think one major issue is that manual processes often don't really "hurt" managers, they hurt the people doing them. To a developer or ops admin, "This $badthing caused by a typo won't happen again if we automate this" sounds very reasonable but sometimes managers just see it as a mistake that someone will need to be more careful about. Once they've factored the turnaround time into how they estimate they don't seem as interested in speeding things up. All that seems exacerbated by reactionary/feature driven mindsets which makes any kind of improvement that doesn't have an external event/person driving it very hard to get slotted. This seems to be made worse if you're working with a manager that's never really done the work that the people they're managing do or they did it so long ago they don't have an intuitive understanding of how it works today. Another one is that a lot of people who perform a manual process for a long period of time become invested in it and defensive of it. No matter how much faster or better it is and no matter how involved they are if they end up feeling threatened it's probably dead in the water. Pretty typical human nature thing I think but at a big company with a lot of old established manual processes this can slow automation efforts down to a glacial crawl. Even if there's only one person that fully understands it I don't think managers appreciate the risk of having all of your eggs in one basket. Eventually things do get automated but it seems like it's driven by a disaster or politics more than anything else. And sometimes not even disaster seems to be enough to drive real change if someone isn't pursuing it. If anyone has tips on how to deal with any of this I'd love to hear them.
- NumberCruncher 10y agoAutomate your own tasks and do not tell anybody. Have a chilled out life! It worked out for me until a got hospitalized for weeks and the college who took over my tasks figured it out. I did the same two more times and leard a lot about refactoring bad architectures. I jumped ship an sold myself as the guy who automates processes. Now I can refuse doing boring manual tasks. It makes me really satisfied.
- whenwillitstop 10y agoMost of marketing at traditional compnaies can be automated by ML. This is already happening, but there are huge F500 companies where the employees have an incentive not to automate.
- jenkstom 10y agoThere are always incentives not to automate. I think people forget this sometimes. Look at the cotton gin, there was massive opposition to it.
- ju-st 10y agoOrdering of stuff from central IT. I waited 3 months for my RSA token (which I need for working remotely). My boss waited 4 months for a dev server he desperately needs for a customer project. The request for the server was only processed when my boss talked to some other guy who knows someone from the central IT department. And the requested server wasn't even physical hardware but a virtual server!
- iamdave 10y agoI waited 3 months for my RSA token (which I need for working remotely). My boss waited 4 months for a dev server he desperately needs for a customer project. Pardon my language: holy shit. How large is your organization??? All I do at work is build dev environments, manage credential storage, and every now and then get roped into server upgrades kicking and screaming...four months for a freaking dev environment??? FOUR? How does this happen?
- wellsthrowaway 10y agoAt Wells Fargo, I'd kill for a dev environment in general. We only do production-classified-as-dev. And 4 months? Slow down! We're six months...if you're lucky.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y agoAt Wells Fargo don't you kill if there is a sales incentive program to kill?
- wlesieutre 10y agoHow's that joke go? Everybody has a testing environment, some people are lucky enough to have a separate environment to run production in?
- user5994461 10y agoHow do you guys manage to do anything? Are you even trying?
- 10y ago
- crimsonalucard 10y agoLogging jira tempo hours.
- throwaway1892 10y agoCreating Jira accounts and giving them access to the right projects. It's one of my jobs.
- tyingq 10y agoThe difficult part is that the areas that could be automated are usually the ones that would buy the automation software. The person signing up for the automation would be reducing their total headcount, making them a perceived smaller player in the overall organization. I've seen this in the purchasing part of big corporations. They automate with Ariba or similar, but then, don't shrink (even via attrition) to get the benefit. Worse, because all these people still want something to do, they then inject more manual processes to feel like they are busy. Ugh.
- MooBah 10y agoInterviewing and hiring interaction for seasonal workers. We hire tons and tons of IC's two times per year. We run into bottlenecks due to time on the phone during interviews. If there way a consistent way to screen talent it would save us a ton of time.
- sharmanaetor 10y agoWhat is the skill set you are hiring for? Where do you get most of your good hires?
- icey 10y agoI'd love to chat with you about this; my contact info is in my profile if you're interested.
- p_ronto 10y agoI've never used it myself (I'm just a programmer) but perhaps Workable (https://www.workable.com/ https://www.workable.com/) might be what you're looking for.
- mnm1 10y agoBringing our main app into various states (and also regular Selenium tests based on the same code, ideally in Clojure). It currently takes dozens of clicks and dozens of pages, all super repetitive to get to most places in the app (super long question / answer based interface). I should have done this years ago when I joined but the pain has finally become great enough that it can't be ignored anymore.
- simplyshift 10y agoEating
- krabpaaltje 10y agoSoylent comes close
- danraftis 10y agoOur company pumps out tons of long-document PDFs that are fairly complex in terms of text, charts, tables and whatnot. We then take the docs, excel files, and charts into InDesign to create a nicely designed PDF to upload online. I need to find a way to automate this workflow. Anyone out there experience this in their organization and want to work together on something?
- evadne 10y agoInDesign itself is scriptable, but you may also want to look into automating it on the server using iText, which is available in Java and .NET flavours.
- p_ronto 10y agoCheck out pandoc. With it you could convert your documents into Markdown. Then use common *nix text-utils to merge the parts you want into a single file and then load it to InDesign. Check out this article (http://rhythmus.be/md2indd/ http://rhythmus.be/md2indd/) that inspired me to automate protocol specs extraction from Word documents (bluurgh).
- fgcbs 10y agoHi danraftis, I'm interested in a generic solution solution to automate (instead of manually cut+paste) assembly of PDF files. Contact me at ycco@fgrazi.33mail.com if you are interested in working together as pilot user.
- feep 10y agoIt’s not entirely clear what kind of PDFs you are building, but I’d like to hear more. I’ve done this for 13 years (Mostly Quark instead of InDesign, but the same tools and tricks). Let me know if you want to work together. rusty [you can email, feepish @ google’s free email]
- michael_michael 10y agoDomestic freight, specifically rate quoting and booking. I sell large equipment to the food & spirits industry. It often has to be shipped on pallets. Before a customer decides to order something from us they generally want to know the freight shipping cost. Rates vary daily, so our salesperson has to stop the sales process to get a freight quotation. 3PL companies already exist, and are supposed to exist to get a best-available rate from the sprawling mess of local, intrastate, and interstate freight carriers. Still, we've found that to REALLY get the best freight rates we have to send out a quote request to 3+ different 3PL companies, wait for all the quotes to come back in, figure out the cheapest quote from the most reliable carrier, then re-ask the same 3PL parties if they're willing to beat the best available rate. The sales process loses a ton of momentum, and it wastes our shipping manager's time.
- ajford 10y agoSo what you're saying is you need a Third Party 3PL Logistics company :)
- luisobo 10y agoOffboarding
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y agoUsing my left hand on the keyboard. Edit: What? This is a great idea. Does anyone know a good encoding scheme for the 10 key?
- foreigner 10y agoAutoCAD used to be amazing at this.
- Fnoord 10y agoOur password policy is pretty terrible. We don't even have our own user profiles. Whenever I'm on a different desk than my own, I get to experience a completely different desktop. With completely different applications installed, settings, etc. I work part-time hence my desk isn't the same permanent spot, so this does occur regularly. So apart from a security hazard, this is also a productivity loss. I'd also swap everything to Linux (my preference is macOS, but I can see how that'd increase cost). For the kind of development we do, Linux is just as good as the other two. I honestly don't know how to solve the issue for me easily. Perhaps just install all applications and settings on a thumb drive?
- andrewfong 10y agoI used to work in a big law firm working on startup-related corporate work. A substantial portion of my job looked like this: * Find a form or template for a document. Sometimes the "template" wasn't really a template but "we worked on a deal that was pretty similar to this one three months ago -- use that". Sometimes the template was "use this form except for this one section you should use from that form". * Tag form / template as "version 1" in our document management system. * Fill in all the blanks, remove brackets, etc. * Tag this as "version 2" in our document management system. * Create a diff / redline with all my changes. * Send diff to partner for review. * Incorporate changes from partner into document. * Replace (rather than append) "version 2" in our document management system with the new doc. * Email document to opposing counsel for review. * If we're sharing docs with opposing counsel via Dropbox, Box, etc., upload there too. But also email them, because they might not remember to check Dropbox. * Bug opposing counsel every 24-48 hours until they respond with an edited copy of our document. * Let partners and clients know that you are bugging opposing counsel so they know it's totally not your fault if this deal doesn't get done by Friday. * Save opposing counsel's edited document as "version 3" in our document management system. * Create a diff of the document they send and ask partner to review. * Bug partner every 24 hours until they respond with more changes. * Save this as "version 4" in our document management system. * Send this, along with a diff, back to opposing counsel. * Somewhere in this process we also pass along to our actual client for review. * Repeat until no one has any more changes. Do this for many more documents that are part of the same deal. * Send out the first set of documents for signature. Some people don't want to actually review the things they're signing (crazy!), so we create "signature packets" where it's just like four signature pages in a row. Also, everyone has a different set of documents to sign so different people get different sets of pages + documents -- and sometimes we need to make sure that person X doesn't see some document that only person Y can see because secrets. * Or we use an e-signature service, in which case I spend some time creating little boxes over all the document so the service knows that this is a place where a signature-like image has to go. * Discover some error in document. Fix. Redo all of my little boxes. * Respond to people confused about how e-signatures work. Sometimes if there are four documents, the signatory gets four e-mails and then they're confused as to whether they should just sign the last one or all four or whatever (you should sign all four). Also, sometimes people refuse to use e-signatures, so we have to explain to people that because Docusign says the deal is done doesn't mean it's actually done. * Sometimes this is where we file stuff with the state government. * Send out a second set of documents of signature. We don't send these out with the first set (even if the same person is signing stuff in both the first and second set) because it's very important that the second set not be signed until after the first set is signed by all the parties (or after we get some sort of confirmation back from the government if there's a filing involved). Sometimes we have very important people that hate being interrupted to sign documents, so we let them sign everything in one go but hold some of those signatures "in escrow" so we can "release the signatures" in the right order. * Track all of the outstanding signatures and filings via a spreadsheet and try to update this in as "real time" as possible. * Respond to partner or client asking you about deal status by pointing to spreadsheet. * Respond to partner or client unable to open spreadsheet for whatever reason by summarizing signature status in text form. * Bug people periodically until everything is signed. * If any of the parties to a deal refuses to e-sign stuff, this is where I have to create a "final" signed PDF copy of the documents, wherein I replace blank signature pages in a document with some faxed or scanned signature page. * If signatures were being held "in escrow", bug the people who are holding the signatures in escrow for confirmation that the signatures are released. * Sometimes these people need to bug other people for confirmation. These people then ask lots of questions like "has other person X signed yet?". Point to spreadsheet. * Sometimes money gets wired here. Wait until we confirm the money came in. * Signatures are released! The money came in! Tell everyone the deal is done! * Curl into fetal position.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y agoEstimating when we'll have something done by modelling the department like some people model the weather.
- matchagaucho 10y agoThe most productive teams I work with are using Slack bots to automate several tasks/notify the team. Many bots are admittedly experimental, but individuals are empowered to optimize or unsubscribe from a channel.
- yoshyosh 10y agoCreating multiple versions of share images for social media
- janci 10y agoThis seems to me like a simple tool to do the job. Could you please elaborate on the requirements?
- kabes 10y agoA better version of this: http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live . The corporate bullshit generator. If it could also make powerpoints with nice graphs of merging product timelines, we could replace most of management.
- jehna1 10y agoLawyers. The problem is, that it's really time-consuming and expensive to get decent terms of service/privacy policy/other common legal document squeezed out of your local lawyer. The initial version is basically a copy-paste of some template that just has your own company's name put in and does not anyhow describe the service you're building. After a week or two with back-and-forward you'll get to settle for some English-like gibberish 15-page document that has been passed through the email and you're sure that after all the hours you've put in to try to make sense of the document your clients have no chance to understand even half of it so you're just putting it in since the whole service is already past the deadline and everyone's anyway blindly ticking the box without reading. The reason why this hasn't changed is that lawyers get paid by the hour, so it's not wise for them to automate anything. For personal projects I've used some of the 5$ templates from quick Google search, but the problem is that I have no-one who'd take the blame when the shit hits the fan. In the perfect world this would be an automated computer program that'd ask me a few questions and produce a perfectly understandable and legally binding document that has some trustworthy corporation behind it making sure I won't get sued for trying to do simple business.
- blazespin 10y agoYou can't really automate lawyers, unfortunately, anymore than you can automate accountants. Someone has to assume the liability for giving you legal advice / accounting advice. Computers can't yet assume such liability.
- jehna1 10y agoThat's true. The computer cannot be liable for the advice. I see two ways around this: 1. The company behind the computer takes full responsibility and charges for the risk. Stripe has made online payments a breeze, because they are the one taking responsibility for the legal things (securing payments, proofing physical access to servers holding the credit card data etc). 2. The tool is so understandable that I'm willing to take the legal risk. There are a few tools that make accounting so easy for a small business owner that I'm willing to take the legal risk myself about the accounting.
- 10y ago
- gigatexal 10y agoDatabase changes. We can't use database projects just yet but I'd like to find a way to automate it much the same way that you can apt-get install things.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- douche 10y agoDaily standup meetings. I'd build a robot, tape a picture of my face onto it, and program it to tromp over to the conference room, zone out for fifteen minutes as everyone goes around the circle like it's kindergarten show-and-tell, then read my commit messages for the day before, the titles of the tickets I've picked out to work on today, and finish with "No roadblocks". It'd save me an hour a day in interruptions and wasted time. Now I just need to build the robot...
- majewsky 10y agoWe recently switched to holding the daily standup in Slack, using a simple /remind Time for the daily standup! Say what matters and where you need help. everyday at 10 AM (Before, the meeting was in voice chat, not a physical standup since we're at multiple locations.)
- ihaveahadron 10y agoWhat automated processes could be done better manually by a competent person?
- knieveltech 10y agoTime tracking. Like, the physical act of figuring out how much time was spent on X task for Y client and then logging that in. And no, cheesy little desktop apps that provide a UI and timers for this are not the answer I'm looking for.
- nikolaj 10y agoThe challenge we faced and still face is more making it clear on how to classify time to the rank and file team (I work in a digital agency). We are pretty much ~90% now.. ..some lessons learned: 1. Just have people track rough time per day (a couple hours here, a couple hours there), but make sure it is done daily. The resolution will hold up when you analyze it. What seems rough each day, ends up being quite accurate over weeks/months. 2. Don't be strict about budgets AND ask for perfect accuracy in time tracking. You are offloading the responsibility of good estimates to the team, and boxing them in.. screwing your long term job costing. 3. Build a dashboard that summarizes project / account status and is as useful and obvious for Project Managers & Leadership, and they will become advocates in promoting good time tracking hygiene. (I guess this is a basic truism in general.. build systems where the best way to use it is the easiest way.. )
- jwho82 10y agoI built my own SaaS tool to track my hours I worked when I used to do freelancing. I can create various tasks under the client's project and then log my hours. I can then create reports to see how much time I spent on each task for each of my clients. Or even better, I can take those hours and create an invoice out of all my uninvoiced hours and email it right to my clients.
- 33W 10y agoI don't have to get that specific with time, just hours worked, but I use IFTTT to track the hours I am physically at the office. Beyond that I'm pretty good about remembering work done offiste or at home.
- egberts1 10y agoI would automate coffee making. Too many lazy or disrespectful coworkers skipping the making of coffee after taking the last cup.
- yellowapple 10y agoThe IETF tried that, but everyone ended up just building "compliant" teapots and calling it a day.
- m-p-3 10y agoDelegating some rights to some managers in Active Directory. For example allow them to add or remove access to specific groups in a way that is intuitive to them. It would allow us to focus on other stuff, and they would be able to quickly grant access without waiting after us at all.
- DougN7 10y agoI wish a customer could go to our online order form and press "Price Quote" instead of "Order" and get a price quote (PDF) that they could give to their purchasing department. It would only take a few hours to pound out, but there is always higher priority work.
- Corrado 10y agoI would like a tool that looks at what people are doing and fills out timesheets automatically. Stop asking your developers what they are working on directly and start looking at their artifacts. For example, if Dev A. just checked in a bunch of code for Project Alpha, there is a good chance they have been working on Project Alpha for the past X hours. If QA person Q just ran a bunch of tests for Project B and updated a spreadsheet, there is a good chance that they have been working on Project B for the past Y hours. Person W just updated a bunch of Wiki pages for Project C? And so on. Sure, you can't capture everything everyone does, but most of the "timesheets" I've had to fill out in the past could have at least started with this information and allowed me to modify it. I hate filling out timesheets and keeping track of what I do. I'm doing work, something should keep track of that for me.
- ivm 10y agoIsn't it what time trackers do? Mac: https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/ https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/ (our app, the site lacks info but it has export now) Linux: https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy Windows: http://www.manictime.com/ http://www.manictime.com/
- AznHisoka 10y agoonboarding new developers so they understand the essentials of our archeitecture and code base. that includes writing up all the documentation. (what, you thought youd just create a sleek ui with the documentation provided by users? no! thats the hard part!)
- robmay 10y agoWe do this at Talla. A lot of our companies use us to onboard new employees in Slack, or MS Teams.
- bsvalley 10y agoTo answer your question about Software companies, the main process that will be automated is software development. AI is coming and engineers will be leaving.