Automating manual work for small teams

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Most advice about automating manual work assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What to keep

Automate the boring and repeatable, not the judgement calls. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

Where to start

Half-automated processes can be worse than manual ones. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.