Automation is a documentation problem
You cannot automate a process nobody can describe. The uncomfortable hour of writing it down is the actual project.
Every automation engagement I have run began the same way: someone describes a process confidently in two sentences, and then we spend an hour discovering it has eleven steps and three exceptions that only one person knows.
This is not a failure of the client. Processes evolve as accumulated workarounds. Nobody sat down and designed them.
So the first deliverable is never a workflow. It is a document: triggers, inputs, decisions, outputs, exceptions, and who owns each. Build from that and the automation is almost mechanical.
The side effect is often more valuable than the automation. Half the steps turn out to be unnecessary once written down.
Working on something like this?
I take on a small number of automation, development and writing engagements each quarter.
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