Perhaps a team is spending too much time chasing renewals. Or someone has to check a list, work out which customers need attention, send reminders and make sure nothing has been missed.
The obvious question is:
“Can we automate this?”
Quite possibly.
If a renewal reaches a known date and the same reminder should go to the right person each time, automation can remove work nobody needs to keep doing by hand.
The same applies elsewhere. A job reaches a particular stage and somebody needs alerting. Information entered in one place needs copying somewhere else. A standard message needs sending when something specific happens.
Those are good candidates because the business already knows what should happen and when.
When the system decides that something should happen, would two people doing the job interpret that point in the same way?
That question becomes important when software is about to send, chase, move or update something without a person checking the individual case first.
The automation can work perfectly and still do the wrong thing
Imagine a service business that uses the status Ready.
One person marks a job Ready when all the information has arrived from the customer. Another uses Ready when they have finished their own part. An experienced employee knows that one type of job needs an extra check, so they leave it at the previous stage until somebody has looked at it.
Now somebody suggests sending an automatic customer message whenever a job becomes Ready.
Technically, the automation can do exactly what was requested. The status changes, the message goes out and the customer receives it.
The difficulty is that Ready doesn’t yet mean one dependable thing.
A customer could be contacted too soon. Work could move forward before a check has happened. A case needing extra attention could follow the same route as everything else. Staff could see that the system has acted and assume the job has been dealt with.
The software has followed its instruction correctly. The weakness sits in the meaning of the instruction.
That is what makes this kind of automation risky. A difference that people currently resolve through judgement can become a repeated business action.
You don’t need to define everything first
None of this means a business has to document every step or settle every possible exception before improving the way the work is handled.
A first working system can start with enough shared structure for people to use it properly: one record for the job, a named owner, a status, the information people need and a clear place to record what happens next.
People can still make decisions. A manager can step in. A case that doesn’t fit can be held back. Someone can decide that a job isn’t Ready after all.
That freedom helps the business learn.
It’s one reason working software can teach you more than a long specification. Once people are using the same system with real customers and real jobs, differences that were easy to miss in conversation become visible.
If two people keep choosing Ready at different points, that needs resolving. If staff keep adding the same note before moving a certain type of job on, there may be a missing check. If one person keeps stopping the same kind of case, that exception deserves attention.
The business learns what the repeated action really depends on.
How do you know a step is ready to automate?
Before allowing software to take an action without somebody checking the individual case, ask four questions:
- Is the trigger clear? Would two people doing the job recognise the same point?
- Is the next action consistent? Should the same thing happen in the straightforward cases?
- Can an exception stop? Is there a clear way to keep a case out of the automatic route when somebody needs to look at it?
- Would you be comfortable if this happened without somebody checking first?
A “no” doesn’t kill the idea. It shows where the automation needs a little more thought before the business relies on it.
Bring us the thing you want to automate
Automation is becoming easier to create. That makes it tempting to start with the action itself: send this message, move this job, create this reminder.
The better starting point is the business result you want.
You want renewals chased without somebody constantly checking a list. You want the next person alerted without somebody remembering to tell them. You want the same information moved without somebody copying it by hand.
Bring AlphaFirst that problem.
We can work out what has to be true for the repeated action to happen safely, where a person still needs to make a judgement and what the smallest working answer should be.
If you have a spreadsheet, tracker, inbox or another way of managing work and can see something that should be happening with less effort, show us how it works today.
We’ll help you judge whether it is ready to automate, what needs to sit around the automatic action, and whether a focused Day-1 Build is the right way to solve it.