Automating is not simplifying
When a process wears everyone out, the reflex is to automate it. That is often the right call. But automation has a side effect people underestimate: it freezes things. What used to be a habit becomes a rule written into the code.
A typical case
A document goes through four approvals. Nobody remembers why the third one exists — it is historical. Automating it as is means carving those four steps in stone for the next five years. Questioning them first sometimes solves the problem without writing a single line of code.
The order that works
- Describe what actually happens, not what should happen
- Remove the steps that no longer serve anyone
- Simplify what remains: fewer exceptions, fewer special cases
- Automate only then
The first three steps cost almost nothing and regularly save half the development work.
The warning sign
If explaining the process takes twenty minutes and ends with "it depends", the problem is not technical. No tool makes a vague process clearer: it just makes it faster to run, exceptions included.
What automation does very well
It excels at whatever is stable, repetitive and judgement-free: copying data from one place to another, sending a reminder on a fixed date, producing an always-identical document, checking that a field is filled in. Boring, low-risk tasks nobody will miss.
In short
Before asking "how do we automate this?", ask the question that comes first: "do we still need to do it?" It is the only optimisation that is faster, cheaper and never breaks down.