Before You Automate, Read This
Important parts of a workflow often aren’t written down anywhere. How to capture the invisible work underneath processes to make digitization more successful.
Your organization just decided to modernize. Maybe it’s a new HR system. A digital approvals process. An automated onboarding workflow. Whatever it is, someone has asked you (or your team) to participate in “gathering business requirements.”
You might not know exactly what that means. And honestly? That’s fine.
But here’s what you do need to know: what happens in this phase will make or break the entire project. Not the software. Not the vendor. Not the IT team. This phase. Right now.
Most technology projects don’t fail because of bad technology. They fail because the people designing the new system didn’t fully understand how the old one actually worked (in reality) before they started building.
There’s the official version: the policy manual, the org chart, the standard operating procedure document someone made in 2019. And then there’s the real version.
The real version is full of things that would never make it into a manual:
The person who always catches a missing attachment before anyone else notices
The manager who picks up the phone to unstick an approval that’s been sitting for two weeks
The team that quietly adds three extra days to every project timeline because they know a certain review step always takes longer than it should
The workaround someone built in a spreadsheet that nobody officially knows about but everyone uses
Ready for the 5 Questions to Ask Before You Automate Anything? Read more here: https://daniellegilliam.substack.com/p/before-you-automate-anything-read
