Automation projects in professional services usually start from a list. Someone asks the partners what wastes time, the answers are collected, and the loudest item gets built.
It is a reasonable process that reliably picks the wrong target, because what people report is what annoys them, and what costs money is what has stopped annoying them.
Irritation and cost are different things
A task that takes twenty minutes and goes wrong occasionally generates complaints every time it fails. A task that takes four minutes, works fine, and is done eleven times a day by six people generates none at all — and costs several times more.
The second one has been absorbed. It is just how the work is done, nobody experiences it as a problem, and it will never appear on a list gathered by asking.
Watch the work instead
The only reliable way to find it is to sit with people while they do their job for a few days. Not a workshop, not a process map drawn on a whiteboard — the actual work, including the parts nobody would think to mention.
What consistently turns up:
- Re-keying. The same information typed into a second system because the two do not talk. Usually the single largest item, and never volunteered, because it is regarded as normal.
- Assembly. Building a document, pack or report by copying from three places.
- Chasing. Time spent finding out the status of something, which exists because status is not visible anywhere.
- Checking. Verifying that a previous step happened, done by people who no longer trust it.
- Reformatting. Data that arrives in one shape and is needed in another, fixed by hand every month.
Rate them by total time, not by unit time
Multiply duration by frequency by the number of people doing it. The ranking that falls out is usually nothing like the ranking that came from asking, and it is almost always dominated by short tasks done constantly.
Then apply a second filter: how stable is it? Automating something that changes every quarter buys a maintenance liability. Automating something that has been done the same way for six years is a purchase.
The ones to leave alone
Worth saying explicitly, because automation programmes overreach:
- Judgement. If the step is a decision requiring expertise, automate the preparation around it and leave the decision.
- Genuinely rare work. A quarterly task taking an hour is four hours a year. It does not repay a build.
- Anything upstream of a broken process. Automating a bad process makes it faster and harder to change.
Then build it where the work happens
The output of this exercise should be two or three things, built into the tools people already use rather than into a new system to log into. That is a separate discipline and the place most of these projects fail — but it only matters once you have picked the right target.
We start by watching the work for exactly this reason. The answer is rarely the thing anybody named.
Wondering where your fee-earner time goes? Get in touch, or read about our professional services work.