Automating manual work: what to get right first

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you only fix one thing about automating manual work this quarter, make it the first item below.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Start here

Automate the boring and repeatable, not the judgement calls. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Then this

Document the process before you automate it. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Eventually

Half-automated processes can be worse than manual ones. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

How to tell if yours is fine

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Three things worth confirming about automating manual work before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Document the process before you automate it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.