🗺️ Where the opportunities are
Automation opportunities aren't hidden in exotic places — they're in plain sight, in work nobody wants to do. Three areas account for almost all of them: routines that repeat, bottlenecks where the work piles up and copy-paste between systems that don’t communicate.
✓ Where to look
- ✓Reports put together by hand every week
- ✓Data copied from one system to another
- ✓Standardized emails answered one by one
- ✓Spreadsheets updated manually every day
✗ Where it tends to be a waste of time
- ✗Strategic decisions that change every time
- ✗Tasks done once a year
- ✗Negotiations that require reading people
- ✗Processes with no stable rules
💡 Practical tip
Ask anyone on the team: "what part of your day do you hate doing?" The answer almost always points straight to a routine that can be automated.
🚦 Signs of an automatable task
Not every tedious task is worth automating. The ones that are have clear signals: stable rules, high volume, structured data, and predictable results. The more signals that line up, the stronger the candidate.
🎯 The 4 signs that matter
- •Deterministic: the same input always produces the same output.
- •Repetitive: happens many times a day, week, or month.
- •Rule-based: you can write the "how to do it" in clear steps.
- •Tedious: low cognitive value, high attention cost.
📊 Candidate thermometer
🎤 Interview the process owner
The process described in the manual is almost never the real process. To uncover the truth, you talk to the person who does the task every day — and how you ask makes all the difference. Use a interview sequence that reveals hidden steps, shortcuts, and pain points.
"Show me how you do it"
Live demonstration
Ask the person to perform the task while you observe. The informal shortcuts only show up in practice.
"What annoys you most here?"
Pain map
Frustration points directly to the bottleneck. Where it hurts, there’s value in automating.
"When does this go wrong?"
Hunt for exceptions
The exceptions you don't uncover now will break the automation later.
⚠️ Attention
Never ask “how should it be?” That gets you theory, not practice. Ask “how does it work today, really?”—warts and all.
📋 Task inventory and frequency
Without an inventory, you prioritize by intuition—and intuition gets it wrong. List every repetitive task with its frequency e time per run. Multiplying reveals where time really leaks over the course of the year.
📊 Illustrative inventory
| Task | Time | Frequency | Total/year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build a weekly report | 90 min | weekly | ~78 h |
| Copy orders to a spreadsheet | 8 min | daily | ~32 h |
| Reply to a standard email | 5 min | 10×/day | ~200 h |
illustrative — notice how a 5-minute task becomes the biggest on the list because of its volume
💡 Practical tip
The formula is simple: time per run × annual frequency = total time. Small, frequent tasks almost always beat large, rare ones.
📐 Effort × impact matrix
With the inventory in hand, you need to prioritize. The effort × impact matrix compares how difficult something is to automate with how much the automation delivers. The golden corner is high impact, low effort — always start there.
✓ Prioritize
- ✓Quick wins: high return, little effort
- ✓Large projects only after proving value
✗ Avoid
- ✗High effort, low return
- ✗Start with the most complex process
🥇 Choose the first process
Your first project defines your reputation. It needs to be small enough to deliver quickly, visible enough so everyone notices and low risk to avoid causing damage if it fails.
🎯 First project criteria
- •Small: delivery in days, not months.
- •Visible: the benefit goes to whoever makes the decisions.
- •Low risk: if it fails, no one stops working.
- •Measurable: you can prove the before and after.
💡 Practical tip
Think of the first project as a demonstration, not as the final solution. It exists to prove that automation works and pave the way for what comes next.
🔑 Key concepts of the module
🎯 Module Summary
Next Module:
2.2 · Process audit — time it, calculate cost and ROI, and document the as-is.