🔁 The dos and don'ts of building automations for your program

👋🏾 This week we’re talking about automations in program management.

Here’s today’s TL;DR

• Build good automations: automations can reduce a ton of manual work in your programs. Or, they can just make everything messier.

• My favorite tools: what they are and how I’m using them in my programs.

✅ ❌ What to do…and what not to do

At minimum, automations save time.

In their full glory, they lead to increased efficiency, reduced error, and enhanced scalability. But just because something is good doesn’t mean you should go full send with no regard for consequences. Here are some quick things to keep in mind when building an automation for your program:

✅ Do: Start with smaller, well-defined processes

✅ Do: Establish a schedule for regular updates & maintenance

✅ Do: Communicate with teammates

❌ Don’t: Do it just to do it

❌ Don’t: Implement solutions without considering future scalability needs

❌ Don’t: Skip thorough testing before deployment

🧰 My (abbreviated) automation toolkit

There are a range of automation tools out there, and even more automation possibilities. Here’s a quick list of my FUA (frequently used automations hehe):

I use Airtable for…

• Creating forms and responding to submissions automatically (Thank you for applying! We’ll get back to you in two business days.)

• Sending emails based on fields and/or logic (if Sally is marked as Approved, send [Approved email]).

• Sending me, and my team, a Slack notification whenever someone submits a form, or to notify us of a specific event (Sally just submitted an application! 🥳).

I use Zapier for…

• Syncing form fields from a website, into Airtable (for forms that aren’t housed in Airtable, my Zap will automatically send all responses from my site (in Webflow), to Airtable. So I don’t need to log into Webflow to view form responses, they show up in Airtable and I can apply all necessary workflows).

• This example is for personal use, but I have a ton of calendars that don’t have visibility into one another. So, every time a new event is created on one calendar, I sync it to my primary calendar. That way I can view everything at once.

ICYMI: Thank you to Black Women in Project Management for the feature!