Automation is one of the most useful tools a business has. It's also one of the easiest to misuse. The mistake isn't automating too little: it's automating the wrong thing, locking a bad process in place so it runs faster and costs more to unwind.
Before you automate anything, the first question isn't how. It's whether the process should exist at all.
Decide whether the work should exist first
Plenty of tasks only exist because of an old workaround, a report nobody reads, or a handoff that was never fixed. Automating those tasks preserves them forever. The better move is often to remove the step, fix the handoff, or let another system own the data, and then there's nothing left to automate.
Good signs a task is worth automating
- It happens often: small in isolation, large across a year
- It follows the same steps almost every time
- It's mechanical: copying, retyping, exporting, reformatting
- More than one person does it the same way
- It stalls the moment one specific person is unavailable
Reasons to hold off
- The process is about to change or should be redesigned first
- The volume is too low to ever repay the effort
- Existing software already does it once configured
- The task is really a symptom of a problem upstream
- Nobody can say what they'd measure to know it worked
The short version
Automate work that's repetitive, high-volume, rule-based, and genuinely worth keeping. Everything else deserves a harder question first: should this exist? Answer that, and you avoid the most expensive mistake in automation: making waste efficient.