- The process lives in people's heads or on paper.
- The normal path is written down but the exceptions are not.
- Nearly every case has something special about it.
What this phase buys you
The real process, exceptions included, leaves a record. Now there is something concrete to learn from and to automate against.
The actual steps as performed, including the awkward cases and what was decided in each, captured where the work happens rather than in a separate act of recording.
Not this. Not a process map drawn in a workshop. That is what people say they do, which is a different document from what they do.
You could reconstruct how a piece of work actually happened, including the awkward cases, from the record rather than from memory.
Automation captures the documented tenth of the job and misses the rest, and the people doing the work conclude the tool does not understand it.
What you actually do
Four moves. None of them needs a platform, and none of them is glamorous. That is the point: this is the work that gets skipped, which is why so many companies are stuck a phase earlier than they think.
Follow the work, do not ask about it
Sit with the people doing it for a week. What they describe and what they do are different documents, and the gap is the product.
Log the exceptions first
Capture the awkward cases before the normal ones. They are rarer, harder to remember and worth more.
Instrument the handoffs
Most delay lives between people, not inside a step. Timestamp the boundaries before optimising anything inside them.
Keep the record where the work happens
A trace that requires a separate act of recording will not survive a busy week. It has to fall out of doing the job.
The usual mistake
Automating the documented process. The documented process is the tidy tenth. The exceptions are the job, and they are where the value is.
- The work leaves no trace. The process happens verbally, on paper or in individual judgement, so there is no record to learn from and nothing concrete to automate against.