Before you invest in automating manual work

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Before you spend anything on automating manual work, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Automate the boring and repeatable, not the judgement calls
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Where it usually goes wrong

Document the process before you automate it. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Half-automated processes can be worse than manual ones. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What this looks like day to day

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about automating manual work before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Half-automated processes can be worse than manual ones — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.