How to use it
Score one specific process — 'routing inbound leads to an owner', not 'sales admin'. Answer as the process behaves on a busy week, not as the documentation describes it. If two people would answer differently, that disagreement is itself the finding.
The four dimensions
- Worth it
- Frequency and time consumed. Anything below roughly two hours a week rarely repays build plus maintenance.
- Ready
- Repeatability, documentation and rule-expressible decisions. This is where most processes fail, and it is the cheapest thing to fix.
- Feasible
- Data access and stability. Automating across a system mid-migration is rework you have scheduled in advance.
- Safe
- Reversibility, observability and ownership. Unowned, unobservable automation fails silently and expensively.
How the bands are set
| Score | Verdict | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 80 percent and above | Automate it | Build, instrument, alert, and name the owner before switching on |
| 60 to 79 percent | Automate the safe half | Automate transport and notification; leave judgement with a person |
| 35 to 59 percent | Standardise first | Write the SOP, agree the rules, run manually for two weeks, re-score |
| Below 35 percent | Do not automate yet | The process is not repeatable, observable or owned — fix that first |
After a high score
- Write the manual version on one page first — it becomes the specification and the documentation.
- Design the failure path before the happy path.
- Make it idempotent so a re-run cannot duplicate records.
- Alert on absence of expected runs, not only on errors.
- Record it in your workflow register with an owner and a review date.
Privacy
Scoring happens in your browser. Nothing is stored or transmitted.
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.