Write it down before you automate it

The woman who ran the orders desk knew that the Leeds account skipped the credit check, and that anything over five thousand waited for a second signature unless it was a repeat customer, and that one supplier invoices in a currency the system cannot handle so she keys it manually on Fridays. None of this was written down anywhere. All of it was correct.

If we had automated that process as described in the meeting, we would have produced confident wrong answers within a week. If we had automated it as she actually performed it, we would have cast twenty years of accumulated habit into something expensive to change. Neither is a good outcome, and both are common.

So now I write it down first. One page, in the order it really happens, not the order of the org chart. My only technique is to listen for the phrase 'well, usually', and to stop and write down the other case every single time I hear it. It slows the meeting down and people find it slightly annoying. The page is always shorter than they fear and stranger than they remember.

Then the interesting conversation happens, and it has nothing to do with technology. Roughly half of her exceptions were worth keeping and should have been in the design. The other half existed because of a system that was switched off in 2019. Deleting those cost nothing and made everything after it smaller.

MMB