The Tootsie Roll Center of Successful Automation

By
Aaron Podolny
July 23, 2020
min read
Updated
September 19, 2023
Photo credit
Automation doesn't have to be hard. In fact, it's supposed to make your life easier. Let's dig into this lollipop and get to the tootsie roll of automation. You'll be amazed by what's inside!
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Introduction

Automating manual repetitive tasks is a no-brainer.

For employers, it means workers focus on high-productivity work. For employees, it means the satisfaction of a meaningful workplace.

So why are there still so many tasks that look like these?

  1. Copy-and-paste from system A to system B.
  2. Do these 28 clicks for each item in a list.
  3. Pull data out of a PDF and input it into a form.

After reviewing the work of thousands of automations at Scribe, I’m convinced that automation is hard because people focus on the wrong part.

The focus tends to be on automation building — how software can be used to convert a task into an automation. However, starting there is almost always a mistake.

Inside every lollipop automation is a tootsie roll center of a process, a series of steps that make up the work. Successful automation begins with a close examination of the steps.

The reason why those steps are so important is twofold:

  1. The automation is going to have to replicate each step in detail in order to get the work done. In everything from marketing to email protection with a DMARC report, automation is necessary. A missed step that an employee doing the task takes for granted can be the difference between success and failure.
  2. More importantly, some of the steps may have to be updated prior to the automation process. Humans are great at fuzzy logic, machines are not. Typically, that’s not a problem, but it does require careful forethought before jumping to building automation.

For this reason, at Scribe, we put defining a process at the center of how automations get built. We want to make it as easy as possible to create step-by-step guides of your tasks... so we build a tool that does it for you.

From there, we have a source of truth about what needs to be automated. This makes building complicated automations manageable and makes shorter ones as easy as pie. Ultimately, this makes the embarking on automation journey all that much tastier.

If you’re curious about unwrapping the sweet benefits of automation, I’d love to talk.

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