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Have you ever had a vacation interrupted or a day off turn into a day on?

If so, you’re not alone. IT teams often face a barrage of repetitive and time-consuming tasks that can consume much of your day, leaving little room for planning, higher-level projects, or even taking some well-deserved time off. The constant cycle of repetitive work is a big contributor to burnout within IT.

In our recent blog, we share some tips for identifying IT tasks that are good candidates for automation. You can also check out our post on the Top Seven Everyday IT Tasks You Should Be Automating, for more info.

  • Repetitive tasks: Any task performed regularly and following a predictable pattern is a good candidate for automation. Examples include software updates, backup processes, and system monitoring.

  • Time-consuming processes: Tasks that consume significant amounts of time but do not require critical thinking, such as patch management and data synchronization, can often be automated to free up your team’s time.

  • Tasks prone to human error: Processes highly susceptible to human error, such as data entry and routine system checks, benefit significantly from automation.

  • Routine maintenance: Regularly scheduled maintenance activities, such as defragmenting hard drives or clearing log files, are perfect for automation. These tasks can run in the background without human intervention.

We hope these tips have been helpful and would like to hear from those in the Spiceworks Community about your game-changing automation.

What’s your biggest automation success story?

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I automated offboarding at a previous company. They were heavy into Windows, so I had an offboarding PowerShell script that ran daily. Everything an employee could access was tied to security groups, including access to 3rd party software we had integrations with. The script would check a specific OU used for offboarding, disable AD, remove group memberships, put the date the account was disabled. Then there was another portion of the script that would purge accounts that were disabled longer than 90 days. It was a nice way to keep AD accounts to a minimum. It was one of the more fun automation projects I’ve worked on.

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I used a spare computer to run automated audio messages for when a location is about to close.

There are appliances that do this task, but the appliance for that specific location died and for reasons I can’t remember it wasn’t about to get fixed any time soon. I proposed the solution before lunch and had proof of concept after a couple of hours.

This from someone who was described as “not knowing what he’s doing” (to put it nicely) since I was new in the industry/out of college.

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