Thorough Documentation for a Quick and Easy Handoff

Something that new or prospective members often wonder about is how we transfer your automations over to you once they’re complete and ready to go live.

Our approach to building automations makes handoff a quick and seamless process, and our documentation ensures that you and your team will know everything required to understand and operate your automations. 

In this post, we’ll explain our handoff process and how we document all of your automations to make them easy to use. 

Building On Your Accounts for a Seamless Handoff

As we covered in our previous post about XRay memberships, we build automations for our members on their own accounts. 

Using secure password management software like Lastpass, we’ll ask you to send us credentials to sign into your automation platform accounts like Zapier or Integromat, along with any other software involved in your automations. 

Our techs will then create all of your automations in those accounts, meaning that you’ll have access to your automations as soon as we’ve built them. As such, there’s no need for us to transfer any files in order for you to start using your automated workflows; they’ll be immediately accessible through your existing logins. 

Instead, the majority of our “handoff” process is focused on providing you with the documentation your team needs to use the automations effectively. 

Robust Documentation Lets You Integrate Automations into Your Business Processes

For each automation that we build, we provide two kinds of documentation: the Process Playbook, and technical documentation. 

Process Playbook

The Process Playbook describes clearly and concisely what each automation does, and what your team needs to do to use it. This will also include links to any relevant resources that you might need to complete the workflow.

We like to say that this documentation keeps the humans informed about what the robots are doing. This is especially true in certain cases where the automation will run without any manual interaction at all. 

In any case, knowing how to use your new automated workflows is critical to ensuring that your team actually uses the automations and takes advantage of them. 

Technical Documentation

While our Process Playbook docs are written by our technicians to summarize and explain each automation, our technical documentation consists of automatically collected metadata stored in an Activity Log.

You can check your Activity Log at any time to see big-picture metrics like how many times a given automation has run or an estimate of the total time saved, or dig in for more granular details pertaining to each individual instance of the automation. Every time an automation runs, you’ll see a detailed record in the Activity Log noting the date and time that it ran, links to any assets the automation created, and other key metadata. 

Combined with the Process Playbook, our technical documentation makes it easy to know what your automations are doing at any time.

Find Everything You Need in the Workflow Dash

To make it easy to find and access your automation documentation, we bundle everything into the Workflow Dash.

The Workflow Dash is an app that we’ve developed at XRay.Tech that lets you and your team save links and resources as easily accessible pins on a shared dashboard. 

The app is free for our members, and we’ll save all of your documentation and relevant links as Pins in your Workflow Dash. Everything you’ll need to use your automations or train new team members will be just a click away. 

The Workflow Dash is just one of the tools that we’re developing internally to help build and manage automations for our members. As new tools become ready for use, we’ll continue to share them 

Keep Everything We Build for Your Company

While we always strive to establish successful, long-term memberships, we understand that your business needs and goals may change over time. If you do choose to end your membership, we’ll be sure to transfer any files you need to keep using your automations. 

As we mentioned previously, there normally won’t be many files to transfer as we build your automation on your own accounts. Typically, we would just need to send you an Airtable base, as we normally use our own Airtable account for our members for the sake of gathering certain metrics.

Otherwise, everything will already be in your possession on your own accounts, so in the event that we do part ways, you’ll have no problem continuing to use your automations. 

Easy Handoff and Delivery

We hope this post has been helpful for clarifying our handoff and delivery processes. Because we work within our members’ systems, we don’t need to transfer many files back and forth. Instead, we focus on organizing and documenting your automations to make them super easy to use. 

If you’d like to learn more about how and why XRay builds automations, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.