Start with a stopwatch, not a strategy

Most automation projects start with a strategy deck. Ours start with a stopwatch.

The workflow audit is the first thing we do with any team, and it is deliberately unglamorous. We sit with the people doing the work, and we time the steps.

Timing the steps

Not the process as it is written down — the process as it is done. How long it takes to find the order that goes with this invoice. How many times a week somebody has to chase a missing document. How long a claim sits between being checked and being approved.

Those numbers are almost never in a system anywhere. They live in people's afternoons.

Costing them

A timed step becomes a cost once you know how often it happens and who does it. Four minutes to match an invoice is nothing. Four minutes, nine hundred times a month, by a team whose time you are paying for, is a line in a budget.

Pricing the outcome

The last part of the audit is the one that matters to the person signing off: what would it cost to have that step done for you, per run, compared to what it costs today?

If the numbers work, you have a business case written in your own team's minutes. If they do not, you keep the findings and there is nothing to buy.

Name the process that is eating your team's week. The audit will tell you what it costs.

We have yet to run an audit where the team did not learn something about their own process — usually that the slow part was not the part everybody assumed.