Automating a Broken Process Makes It Worse

Automation makes a process faster and more consistent. If the process is wrong, the result is being wrong faster, more consistently, and at a scale nobody can review.

Map before you automate

Walk the process end to end with the people who run it, recording every step, handoff, wait and exception. The map is almost always longer than management expects, and it usually contains steps that exist because of a system replaced years ago.

Delete before you build

The most valuable output of process mapping is the list of steps to remove: approvals nobody reads, reports nobody opens, data entered twice, checks that duplicate a later check. Automating those steps preserves them permanently and makes them invisible, which is worse.

Fix sequence and ownership

Many delays are ordering problems, not speed problems: work waiting for an approval that could happen in parallel, or a handoff with no named owner. These are free to fix and often deliver more than the automation would have.

Then automate what remains. The rule of thumb is that a mapping exercise should shrink the process before any software is written; if it did not, the mapping was not honest.