Find it before you fix it
Ask three people to log their work for two weeks in fifteen-minute blocks with a single label each: transport (moving, copying, formatting, chasing, reminding), judgement (deciding, advising, negotiating, designing) or delivery (the actual product). No tooling required; a shared sheet is enough.
The result is usually uncomfortable and immediately actionable. Transport work concentrates in a handful of named tasks, and those tasks are the automation backlog.
Sort the backlog honestly
| Category | Test | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Eliminate | Does anything change if this stops? | Stop doing it. The cheapest automation is deletion. |
| Simplify | Is it complex because of a policy nobody owns? | Fix the policy first, then re-measure. |
| Standardise | Do two people do it differently? | Agree one way and run it manually for two weeks. |
| Automate | Stable, ruled, observable, owned? | Build it — see the readiness score. |
| Leave | Rare, or judgement disguised as transport? | Leave it manual and move on. |
Run the survivors through the automation readiness score before building anything. The middle band — where a process is repetitive but not yet agreed — is where most wasted build effort lands.
Remove it in the right order
Start with the highest-frequency, lowest-judgement task
Daily transport work with no decisions inside it. Fast to build, immediately felt, and it earns the credibility for the harder work.
Automate the trigger before the whole flow
Often the win is not doing the task automatically but knowing instantly that it is due, with the context attached. Half the relief, a fifth of the build.
Keep the human in the judgement seat
The workflow prepares; the person decides. This is also what keeps the automation safe when an edge case arrives.
Measure the reclaimed hours and say where they went
If the time is not visibly reallocated, the team experiences automation as surveillance rather than relief, and cooperation on the next one disappears.
The four places transport work hides
| Hiding place | What it looks like | Usual fix |
|---|---|---|
| Between two systems | Copying values from one tool into another, daily | Integration or a scheduled sync with error alerting |
| Around a meeting | Assembling the same status pack every week by hand | A live view that replaces the pack entirely |
| Inside chasing | Messages asking whether something happened yet | Status visible in the system, plus an alert on breach |
| After a decision | Recording the same outcome in three places | One record of truth, with the rest reading from it |
Chasing is the one people rarely count, because it does not feel like a task. It is usually the largest single category, and it disappears entirely when work state is visible where the work lives.
What to expect afterwards
- The reclaimed hours are named and reallocated, publicly.
- Each removed task has either an owner for its automation or a written note that it was deleted on purpose.
- The team can describe what the workflow does without opening the builder.
- There is a written manual fallback for anything the business cannot pause.
Related work
The full discipline is in business automation; the decision framework is in when to automate a process. If the underlying process is disputed rather than merely manual, start with no SOPs, no accountability.
Muhammad Sameed Abid
Muhammad Sameed Abid is a business operations, automation and growth systems professional with 9+ years across operations management, workflow and CRM automation, marketing operations and customer success. He is currently Head of Customer Success at GHA Marketing and writes here about the operating layer underneath growth.