Appian RPA Project Estimation Guide

This document describes the most important factors when estimating the level of effort for an Appian RPA project.

This document is divided into two parts:  1) how to assess the complexity of a development, and  2) factors to be taken into account that may affect the calculation of this estimate.

Development Complexity

This section aims to provide clear and, when possible, measurable parameters to estimate the complexity of the development of a robotic task.

Application to automate

Depending on the application to automate, the complexity of the process will be different.

It must be taken into account that a process may involve different applications of different complexities.

This document helps to estimate the automation that will eventually be done with RPA. The table of applications below lists the recommended automation technique to use, as well as assumptions made to support those estimates.

Conditions, Decisions, and Exceptions

The number of decisions involved in your robotic task can impact the size of your project. For instance , both simple and more complex conditions, such as traversing tables and performing checks on retrieved data, or even implementing nested decisions on several fields change the complexity immensely.

Take into consideration how you want to handle business exceptions, as well as ways in which you can make your task more robust in handling system exceptions (e.g. checks to ensure the correct upload of a file to a website for example, and the path to follow in case it has not been successful).

Number of windows

Number of user interfaces on the applications that need to be accessed for information exchange (extraction and/or logging) and navigation by the robotic task.

Number of fields

Number of fields that are involved in the process and with which some action such as storing, calculating, etc. must be performed. As a field we consider each single data to automate in the RPA process for example, name, address, identification number, etc.

Additional Factors to Consider When Estimating

The following is a description of additional factors that may alter your project estimates. They include recommendations that may ease the development and can therefore reduce the time, as well as risks that can cause projects to be delayed.

Application Stability

If the application has or can suffer a lot of changes, the robotic task will need continuous adjustments.

While this might not be important for the initial estimation, it is important to consider that the process will require high maintenance.

Level of Detail

The automation project should be as detailed as possible so that the developer does not encounter unexpected behaviour during the development process.

Availability of Data and Environments

Sometimes the process can be well-defined but the developer doesn't have enough data available or limited access to data to perform the development.

Use of 3ubtasks

Consider when you might need to use robotic subtasks as part of your development. When what we want to estimate is a set of steps that impact the same applications, or are repeated across different robotic tasks, our recommendation is to estimate the creation of the subprocess independently instead of the end to end RPA process.

In this way we will create something similar to an API that can be used by the rest of the robotic tasks which will be called every time it is necessary to execute that flow and, therefore, it will only be estimated once.

Application Reliability

If an application is reliable, when the robotic task is developed, there is no need to implement complex robot behaviors or retries for technical problems. However, issues with the application to be automated can introduce additional risks and complexity.