How to choose your first automation
The hardest part of automating a business isn’t the technology — it’s deciding where to start. Pick the wrong first project and you burn goodwill and budget. Pick the right one and everything after it gets easier. Here’s the scoring we use.
Score each candidate on four things
When we look at a workflow, we rate it on a quick 1–5 scale for each of these:
- Frequency — how often does it happen? Daily beats quarterly.
- Time cost — how many person-hours does each run eat?
- Rules-clarity — can the steps be written as clear rules, or does every case need judgement?
- Risk — if the automation gets one wrong, is it easy to catch and cheap to fix?
Multiply frequency by time cost to find where the hours actually pile up, then favour the candidates that are rules-clear and low-risk.
Start where it’s boring, not where it’s flashy
The best first automation is usually unglamorous: re-keying data between two systems, chasing the same documents every week, assembling a recurring report. Nobody will put it in a case study — but it runs constantly, the rules are obvious, and a mistake is easy to spot.
A quiet win that saves two hours every day beats a clever one that saves ten hours once a quarter.
Make the win visible
Before you build anything, write down the current numbers: how long the task takes and how often it runs. After go-live, measure the same thing. A concrete “we got 6 hours a week back” is what earns you the mandate to automate the next five workflows.
Don’t automate a mess
If a process is broken, automating it just makes the mess faster. Sometimes the first “automation” is simply removing a redundant step or a duplicate approval. Simplify first, then automate what’s left.
That’s the whole method: score honestly, start boring, measure the win. Want a second pair of eyes on your list? Book a free automation audit.