The only constant thing is change. Have an idea of how the above might change, that affects your decision making criteria. This is certainly hard to extrapolate; if broken down, one might have a good chance at figuring it out with reasonable probability.<\/p>\n

Companies go through change due to external and internal environments. The external is further categorized according to amount of influence from different entities, these range from direct customers and suppliers to government laws and countries trade agreements. Companies operating in disrupting industries, or ones having a tricky market segment, are more prone to external environmental change. Organizations in stable markets with comfortable market segments, tend to be less affected by external factors. Internal environment I feel is relatively simple with few ingredients like, higher management\u2019s mix, organizational structure, team\u2019s skill set and future direction at the moment.<\/p>\n

I have to admit though, C-level management is all about finding what’s changing and to navigate the ship accordingly, and it’s not an easy job. At the level of detail needed for automation, it can be managed.<\/p>\n

Collaborate<\/h3>\n

When you crunch in the numbers, add folks from all teams to derive conclusions to get the right answer. Everyone has a different insight. No one team can have the whole picture. To get the best value for time spent, get opinions from across the board.<\/p>\n

A great tip here was, \u201cAllow yourself to be influenced by others\u201d. Until others feel you can be influenced by their opinion, you might not get the best suggestions.<\/p>\n

Team\u2019s level of expertise<\/h3>\n

Although this should not be considered at the outset, but something to consider towards the end. I have seen this point coming way up the list, my rationale for bringing it down here is, as quoted from my favorite book \u201cHow google works\u201d, “the internet has rendered resources and computation power almost limitless”. If you see a clear benefit in setting the scope as, for instance, UI, integration and unit tests with 80% code coverage, while the current QA team cannot handle that, it\u2019s not hard to find resources to get it done.<\/p>\n

When bringing current expertise level at the beginning, decisions made will have that bias in them unwillingly. However, if circumstance do not permit augmenting required expertise, then current skill level is a good idea to consider.<\/p>\n

Anything else you would consider while deciding what to automate?<\/p>\n<\/div>

<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":13305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[43],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n