When automating, make sure you think about automating the solution end-to-end, as part of this you will need to talk to domain experts, the people with tribal knowledge and normally admin rights to the systems.  The people who know not only how the systems work in your environment but also have the specific process knowledge for that area.  These people will help you automate the task so much quicker and easier.  This will also go a long way to gaining their buy in for the task and the areas that will be handed off and covered by this automation process.

It helps if these people already know what you are trying to achieve and even more if they have previous knowledge on automation, scripting or development.  Creating a cross departmental or technology automation task force* will help with building relationships and pave the path for future automation projects.

*YMCA dance not necessary when forming automation task force!

More Automation tips

More tips from this series created by myself and Thomas Corfmat for a session at VMworld 2013 can be found below (updated as published), if you have a login for VMworld.com you can also watch the full session here.