Before You Automate a Process, Make Sure It's Worth Automating
Updated: Sep 6
Automation sounds like improvement.
A manual task takes too long, so automate it. Problem solved.
Except sometimes all you've done is make a bad process happen faster.
Imagine a process where information is entered into one system, checked by somebody else, copied into a spreadsheet and then entered into another system.
You could automate the copying.
But first I'd want to know:
Why are we entering the same information twice?
Why does somebody need to check it?
Why does the spreadsheet exist?
Does the second system actually need the information?
You might discover that half the process isn't needed at all.
And removing an unnecessary step is usually cheaper, simpler and less risky than building technology to perform it automatically.
Automation can be brilliant.
But the order matters:
Understand it → Challenge it → Simplify it → Then automate it.
Otherwise you can spend a lot of money making something inefficient more efficiently inefficient.
