#87 TAG talks Rugby World Cup and "Bombsquad" automation teams

Welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. As always, I'm here with Arno. Arno, welcome.

Thanks, Sascha.

So today we do something different, slightly different, because there's something really big happening at the moment, if you are interested in that, of course, which is the RUG Rugby World Cup in France. And yeah, Arno and myself, we are both not just passionate about process and automation, we're also very passionate about rugby. So hence we thought we'd give this episode today a little rugby touch. And yeah, and we thought we will take one specific word and look at this more in detail and how that might, and how that might relate to what we're doing in companies and how that relates to process and automation. So yeah, very strange twist to it and we will see how it goes. And the one very specific word we wanted to look at is the, or we want to discuss on, is the word bomb squat. So if you follow rugby, rugby a bit and you followed especially this Rugby World Cup, yeah, so the South African teams, the Springboks, have introduced bomb squads as a term and as a strategy to knock out the competition. So that's what we will talk about. And yeah, so very, very interesting to have that in combination with process and automation. Anand, do you like to kick it off?

Yeah, sure, Sascha. Like you said, it's certainly a sort of interesting topic to bring this into process and automation. But I think that on the rugby field, if you look at a team playing, it is a machine. There's a lot of processes inside of that machine, a lot of sort of tasks being executed, decisions being made. And, you know, the overall, obviously, objective is to to win the match. And I think that the sort of the term bomb squad is, is, is I guess akin to, um, the term that a lot of people might be familiar with, which is, which is the skunkworks. And it, it, it's really sort of a, a, a, a group of people, and in the context of rugby, it will be a group of players, um, that are, are quite, quite specialized. Um, you know, they can go in they can sort of achieve a specific goal, a specific task, you know, in, you know, in a sort of a coordinated fashion. And they change the game in doing that. So I guess the sort of, if you look at the analogy with process and automation, I guess it's something that if you were to spin up your process and automation, you know, what are the sort of attributes that you're gonna look look for in this team because you might have your sort of business as usual, let's automate things, you know, let's carry on. And that might feel like a bit of a bureaucratic, slow-moving process. Whereas if you introduce a squad of people that's sort of highly motivated, they're highly skilled, each of them has got a sort of a specific drive that the sort of coach sends them on, they change the direction, of the game. If you look at rugby, for example, if you look at a sort of automation initiative, they might actually change direction and re-energize the automation initiative. And, you know, it's really sort of, like I said, specialized individuals. And again, in the context of, you know, process automation, you know, you might have really specialized developers that could, you know, take process maps. And, you know, this could be process maps that could be in sort of a rough and ready state and take those and really apply automations very rapidly to those processes and kind of bring that to the end users very, very quickly. Absolutely. Yeah. Other than having sort of weeks at an end and sort of endless meetings about what we should do, what we shouldn't do, it's kind of like just pick up the ball and run with it.

Absolutely. Yeah. And we had that situation a while ago, isn't it? And every now and then in companies we have that situation coming up. So for example, COVID, before when COVID happened, suddenly you have that very critical event happening and you need to up with a plan very quickly, um, and you need to come up with a solution, um, something ready to go very quickly, within days, something, or within 24 hours. Some, some insane, uh, capabilities needed here. So there, there is no time for meetings. People just take on the problem and run with it, like, like you said. And they come up with a really powerful solution very quickly, bang on the money, and, uh, and, uh, and continue. And then someone else can take the ball basically and run with it a bit further. But you need that every now and then. You have that very critical moment in business where we need a very quick solution.

Absolutely. And I think it just energized the rest of the team because I think that the overall objective is, if you look at process and automation, is to kind of reach that goal of automation, make sure things are streamlined. You know, so, and again, you know, you could argue that is a moving target. You never really get to that, but it's always steps towards it. But I think with this, it can be leaps toward it. So if you have a, you know, your equivalent of Bob Smart coming in, actually making really rapid progress, energizing the rest of the team, you know, I think that just shakes things up. And then, you know, it actually makes people that's part of the team actually feel like we are producing results. Yeah, we had this catalyst of a kind of highly focused, highly specialized team that came in, you know, they sort of did this work in a, you know, in a very, very quick way. But at the end of the day, you know, it sort of got things moving forward in the right direction. And I think, you know, there's a lot to be said for If you look at a sport like rugby, you could be on the back foot and then all of a sudden you score 2 tries and the whole team just sort of energized again. And it could well be that that's the point where the bonus card has done its job, set direction, and the rest of the team actually then just follow suit. You know, they find strength again, they find the ability to execute again. And it can be a sort of a perfect catalyst. And I think, you know, this is akin to, like I said earlier, to skunkworks within a business. So you could have a business which, you know, it's a large organization, they could have a skunkworks inside them, which is part of sort of free-thinking innovation, you know, that they're not really governed by any of the rules, you know, within reason. And, you know, their job is really kickstart things and, and, and really have a different, a different view and different perspective, you know.

Yeah, it's as well, it's like massively thinking outside of the box, isn't it? Do something completely different. And it's not just, yeah, important for, for these maybe, um, critical or strange event happening in our world, but as well sometimes to think about, okay, so there is a competition, they, they have something, or there is an opportunity out there, so let's, let's get something out very quick, come up with very innovative solution service into the marketplace. So for that go-to-market, you need like, we need the BombSquad. So you need that kind of bundled capability, power to just put something out and then you will smoke the competition potentially out there. And, or you're just a little bit ahead of the competition, which is so important these days to not be left behind, isn't it? You need to definitely have that bundled capability in-house. And yeah, so let's break that down a little bit, what kind of capabilities that might be and how that as well again relates to Rugby.

Yeah, and I think that kind of just looking at some of the attributes, one that springs to mind is sort of just Coordination and collaboration where, you know, you, you have members of this team that really understand their, their role and their position and what their aim is. But also they, they could, they could understand, they could read what other people, team members, which we, they could perhaps provide some coordination for that. You know, I think good communication is key as well. So I think it's not just an individual team that acts on its own. It's more sort of a— it wants to take the whole group with it, and it's very clear in its communication. You know, it understands that the sort of the shared goal of and the shared vision of the project, for example. And it's really sort of, I think, the ability to communicate and collaborate with the rest of the team members and pick them up and really bringing them along that sort of rapid journey to get to that end goal of winning the game. And in this instance, sort of getting that first automation live. I think that it's that energy and power of persuasion of these people, you know, with inside this, this, this bomb squad that I think really can make a difference.

Yeah, I think one very, very important aspect here, I think, is really that shared vision. Because nowadays you have all these individuals, isn't it? Everyone wants to improve in their career a little bit further. Absolutely understandable here and there. But I guess I think, well, that shared vision is so important. Otherwise, you have so many different people pulling in different directions on their own, and that doesn't work to really have a big impact. And once that is clear and everyone understands what they can contribute and if that is well communicated, yeah, I think it's unstoppable, which is great. So, yeah, of course, equally important to coordination and collaboration within that bomb squad is the adaptability. So it's a very difficult word, but, yeah, rugby, as you know, is a very, very fast and fluid game where the players to really and quickly adapt to the changing situations. And that's exactly the same as we have it in businesses when it comes to automation projects and automation technologies. So automation is ever-evolving. So just recently, just the first couple of months this year, we have seen so many new technologies coming in, AI making so many advances. Yeah, so you have so many new challenges around technology coming up. Adaptability, yeah, very important, of course. We know there are so many new challenges coming up with technology regularly. So the team should be really ready to pivot and adapt and learn continuously. And this is very similar to not just rugby players, isn't it? So to any sport, you have to train, train again, learn new things always continuously, to be always ready to go, isn't it? So you have to have daily meetings with everyone and just go through different use cases again and again to just be ready, really.

Yeah, and I think the next point here is looking at sort of things from a tactical and strategic view. Obviously, a sport like rugby is about strength of players, but there's incredible amount of strategic gameplay inside the game. You know, same could be said for other sports as well. We focus on the Rugby World Cup currently, so it's quite topical. But again, the sort of the link with the automation world is pretty much the same where, you know, we do have both tactical and strategic processes that we could effectively look at automating. And if you look at your whole automation program as a whole, you might have a sort of a tactical process where you just automate a process, a quick process here. And, you know, it might well be that using a catalyst like, like the Bond Squad approach is a catalyst to get a tactical process, you know, deployed as soon as possible with the view to re-energize your strategic view, which is, you know, to automate all of your processes and to build automation into your bigger picture. So again, coming back to the Bond Squad, I think that if you look at sending a team of individuals onto the field to make a tactical sort of play that actually changes the direction of your strategic goal, then you are in the right direction. So I think from a gameplay perspective, You know, it's certainly something that sort of people that's very heavily focused on something to rekindle a project with the bigger view to actually, you know, get on track again.

Yeah, awesome. So yeah, very, very next, very important one. Next one is resilience and persistence. So everyone knows in rugby, there will be adversity. So you maybe lose and you have really tough challenges, tough opponents, but pushing through that adversity and basically pushing through the opponent's offensive and maintaining sort of discipline is very, very important. So when you look in automation, you will face equal tough challenges. And yeah, automations might break, critical processes might break, processes might definitely change. You have technical disasters and you're not necessarily ready for it. But yeah, but you have to really get used to it and as a team be prepared to take on those kind of challenges. And you need to really, really have that tenacity to troubleshoot and refine and persist. So, yeah, nothing will break you. Just get through it. So I think that's very important in rugby and in a team, in a business as well. So that's super important.

Yeah, and I think within a team as well, it's always important to ensure that the right degree of training is applied. You know, I think there should always be a continuous state of learning and improvement with inside a team. Perhaps if you, you know, do have different personalities in the team, there might be people that's more likely to be part of your sort of bomb squad, people that kind of just like new things, that like to kind of work in an accelerated, highly agile fashion. But I think You know, at the end of the day, you still have to ensure that, you know, if you want to— if you're in the kind of world of automation, you need to make sure that, you know, you need to stay updated with the latest technologies, you know, what's happening in automation. You know, you should always look at, you know, what is the best ways to improve your skill in order to contribute to the team so that you can constantly strive to automate things and optimize things further and sort of get to those automation goals you've set yourself. And like I said, I think with Insight, a team sport, you know, especially something like rugby, for example, there is an end goal in this instance to win the World Cup. So it is all about sort of training. It's all about knowing people's strengths. It's all about kind of innovation as well. You know, what are the the things that we can innovate, you know, player combinations. And again, no different to, to within the team, you know, which people work well together, you know, which people have got strengths that we don't know exist. You know, you might have a person that's very good technically in creating automations, but then also might have very good people skills. So, you know, facilitators are actually I talk to end users about requirements and explain it, and that's patient and really kind of bridges the gap between what we need to deliver to end users to solve problems versus how that's delivered, I guess, in a technical way.

Yeah, that brings me to sort of last point, obviously not important, is safety and security in both areas on the rugby pitch, just as a rugby player. And yeah, and in business, of course, rugby players wear their protective gear every now and then. Not everyone does, but in different positions, players are a bit more protected to prevent injuries. And yeah, and it's vital for the bomb squad to ensure that when you have the bomb squad in your business, that the automations they implement are first safe, secure, reliable. You look at things like data privacy, robust backup systems, and all these things you need to have in place. So set up fail-safes, yeah, so you can handle those errors when they occur. So, and that's exactly the same what you do as a rugby player. Yeah, safety first, and then you can keep pushing.

Yeah, and governance is important, I think, like you say, that it's not just going out there and actually trying to destroy the opponent. I think it's it's doing it well in a reckless fashion. I think it is all about, you know, doing something that makes a difference, that is fast-paced, but, you know, within the boundaries of safety, security. I think with automation, there are governance that needs to be adhered to. So it is sort of know the rules of the game, you know, make sure that the decisions you make—

Absolutely.

Yeah, that protects your team, but also yourself, the organization you work with inside. So yeah, very critical element. So yeah, I don't know if there's a couple of things you want to add.

No, no, I think that was just a little little rugby-inspired podcast episode. World Cup, Rugby World Cup is happening currently in France. And then we thought that it would be nice to share a couple of those principles and to share a few of the important areas to build a strong and coordinated and resilient process automation team. Yeah, certainly unique. Let us know what you thought about it or what you think about it, and if you think we should do a few more of those. Definitely when it comes to high-performing teams, rugby is really good to look at and the team spirit generally and have this very specialist skills in a team. Yeah, I think that's a really good— is metaphor the right word, Arno? Is it a metaphor? I don't know, but it's a good example to build a good team. So yeah, so if you like to hear more about those kind of topics, just let us know. So we, we have plenty of episodes on process and automation, and yeah, we like to mix it up every now and then. If you have a few ideas, please share them, and we will be back with another episode very soon. And until then, let's automate it.