Automate the Workflow You Have, Not the One in the Slide Deck
The biggest automation failures we see share one root cause: they automated the official process instead of the real one.
Every company has two workflows: the one in the process documentation and the one people actually run. The official version has clean handoffs and defined owners. The real one has a spreadsheet named FINAL_v3_ACTUAL, a quick DM to Priya because she knows the vendor quirks, and a Tuesday-only step nobody wrote down.
Automation projects fail when they’re built against the first workflow. They succeed when they’re built against the second.
Watch the work before you touch it
Before we automate anything, we shadow it. Not interviews — observation. We sit with the person doing the invoice run or the intake queue and watch what actually happens, including the parts they do so automatically they’d never think to mention them.
The exceptions are the spec. The 90% straightforward path is trivially automatable and was never the problem. The value — and the risk — lives in the 10% of cases that need judgment: the vendor whose invoices always misstate the PO number, the applicant whose situation doesn’t fit the form. When someone says “oh, except when…”, that sentence is worth more than the entire process doc.
Automate in slices, keep humans in the loop
We never ship a big-bang replacement. The pattern that works:
- Draft mode — the system does the work, a human approves every action. Weeks, not days.
- Exception mode — routine cases flow through; the system routes anything unusual to review with its reasoning attached.
- Audit mode — humans sample completed work instead of gating it.
Each stage earns the next. The review queue isn’t scaffolding to remove later — it’s a permanent part of the system, because the world keeps producing new exceptions.
The metric that matters
Vendors sell “hours saved.” We track something stricter: touches per case. How many times does a human have to handle this item before it’s done? At one accounting client, touches per invoice went from four to 0.2 — and just as importantly, the remaining 0.2 are the touches that genuinely need a human brain.
The workflow in the slide deck doesn’t need those touches. The workflow you actually have does. Automate the real one.