automate the process you actually run, not the one on the diagram
The diagram is always cleaner than reality. The rules that matter usually live in one person’s head. Find those first, or your automation will be confidently wrong.
Every team has a diagram of how a process works. Every team also has the real version, which is messier, full of exceptions, and mostly undocumented. Automate the diagram and you will build something that is confidently wrong the first time reality shows up.
So we start by watching the process as it actually runs. Who touches it, what they check, what they do when something looks off. The valuable part is almost always the informal rule that lives in one person’s head - the "oh, we skip that step if the amount is under a threshold" that never made it into any document.
where the real rules hide
- the manual check someone does "just to be safe" before hitting submit
- the exception that only one person knows how to handle
- the step everyone forgets until it breaks, then remembers
Once those are written down and agreed, the automation almost designs itself. And crucially, the humans stay in the loop for the cases that are genuinely ambiguous, instead of being replaced by a job that pretends the ambiguity does not exist.
have a system this describes?
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