How to audit your first automation candidate in an afternoon

This is a working exercise, not a theory piece. Block out two hours and run it against one real workflow.

1. Write the workflow down, step by step, exactly as a human does it today. Not the ideal version — the actual one, including the workarounds.

2. Mark every step that requires a judgment call. Circle each place where the person doing it has to decide something rather than just execute.

3. For each judgment call, write the rule they're actually using. If you can't write the rule in one sentence, that step isn't ready to automate — it needs to be simplified or standardized first.

4. Count how many times this workflow runs per week, and how long each run takes. Multiply. That's your real baseline.

5. Ask: what would "good enough" automation look like for the parts that ARE rule-based? Not "fully automated end-to-end" — just the mechanical middle, with a human still making the judgment calls at the start and end.

If you finish this and have a clear, rule-based middle section with a known weekly time cost, you have a real automation candidate. If every step still needs a judgment call, you've found a training or process problem instead — which is worth knowing before you build anything.