ยท 5 min read
Designing workflows people actually follow
The most common reason an automation fails is not a bug. It is that the process it encoded was never the process the team used.
Ask a team to describe their approval process and you get a clean diagram. Watch the same team for a week and you get something else: exceptions, side channels, and one person who quietly does three of the steps for everybody.
Model the real path first
Before you automate anything, trace ten recent items end to end. Not the documented route, the actual one. The difference between the two is where every failed rollout comes from.
Once the real path is on paper, automate the boring middle of it and leave the judgment calls to people. Workflows survive when they remove typing, not when they remove decisions.