Before automating a process: the five questions to ask

When we designed the Scoping Meeting, we set ourselves a constraint: a one-hour interview, not a minute more. One hour is what the head of an SME can give without thinking twice. But if the first half hour is spent discovering their day-to-day work, only thirty minutes are left to decide.

So we wrote a questionnaire to fill in before the interview, in under ten minutes. Writing it taught us more than we expected.

What we learned by writing it

Ask what weighs, not what is urgent

Urgent activities are not necessarily the ones that cost the most. A monthly close that takes a whole day weighs more than a ten-minute emergency, even if the emergency is what people remember. So the questionnaire asked for the activities that come round often and take up a lot of room, and stated that there was no need to make up a third one.

Count frequency and duration

Two multiple-choice questions are enough: how often, and how long each time. A fifteen-minute task that comes round every day adds up to more than an hour a week. These two figures give an order of magnitude of the time at stake, and above all a starting point: without it, no gain can be measured afterwards.

End with a single open question

“If there were just one thing you would like to stop doing by hand, what would it be?” It was often the most useful answer in the whole questionnaire: it says what really matters to the person who does the work.

Five questions to ask before automating

Before entrusting a task to an agent, we check five points. You can do the exercise on your own:

1. Does it come round often, at least several times a week, in a comparable form?
2. Is the information accessible in a tool that can provide it, or only in someone’s head?
3. If the tool gets it wrong once in twenty times, what happens?
4. Can we say what we will measure, and where the figure stands today?
5. Can we go back tomorrow morning, without damage?

A negative answer is not necessarily a refusal. It is often a prerequisite: stabilising the process, gathering the data, or measuring the starting point before beginning.

What became of it

This questionnaire first prepared the Scoping Meeting: a person read your answers, and it was the interview that drew the conclusions. The Flash Diagnostic has taken its place: two minutes of questions to click through, and straight away your AI maturity level, the offer to start with and your first use cases. Its lessons still serve us during the meeting, to quantify the time at stake.