The question that never gets an answer
You sit down next to Marisa, who has been doing that job for nine years, and you ask her to take you through it from the start, so you can write it down
She sets off, reaches the third step, and stops, because it depends, she says, it depends on who sent the document, it depends on the time of year, it depends on whether they put the code in or not, and while she's saying it she opens a folder, looks at something, closes the folder, and carries on without telling you what she looked at
Half an hour later you have two pages of notes and the distinct feeling you understood none of it, and the easy conclusion would be that the process can't be automated, when in fact the process exists all right, it has simply never been put on paper
Why the person who has done it for years can't describe it
Someone who has repeated the same procedure for years stops seeing it as a sequence of choices and sees it as a single motion, like driving or tying your shoes, and if you try to explain to somebody how you tie your shoes you find it's much harder than doing it
Inside that single motion there are the real rules, the ones that always hold, and there are the habits picked up once for a reason that no longer exists, and after nine years you don't tell them apart, because they feel the same, both of them are simply how it's done
Then there's the worst piece, the one nobody mentions because they don't count it as work, the quick check by eye before saving, the email you go back to when a number looks odd, that one supplier who gets handled his own way, things that in Marisa's head aren't a step at all, just common sense
You don't start from the rules, you start from the cases
The mistake is asking for the rules out loud, because out loud they come in the wrong order, and only the ones that spring to mind first come out at all
The way that works is the other way round, you look at the real cases, one after another, twenty or so, taken as they arrived without picking them, and for each one you look at what went in, what came out, and what the person did in between
After the first few the skeleton is already there, always the same fields, always the same screens, then as you go on the sequence repeats and the things that don't fit begin to surface, and you see the exceptions that matter because they're right in front of you, not because somebody remembered them
It works because a person's memory is terrible at listing and excellent at recognizing, put Marisa in front of a real document and ask why she did it that way and she'll tell you in two seconds, ask her in the abstract when you do it that way and she'll tell you it depends
The exceptions aren't the problem, they're the information
When the twentieth exception turns up, the natural reaction is to decide it's all too complicated, when in fact that's the moment things fall into place, because now you can look at them and ask how often they really happen
Count them and they sort themselves out, the ones that keep coming back on one side, the ones that happened once and never again on the other, and an automation doesn't have to handle them all, it has to handle the normal case well, recognize the odd one, and stop, leaving it to a person
An automation that can say I don't understand this one, you take a look, is far more useful than one that plows on and guesses, and that's how Muffin Suite works
In the end the process is written down, and that you keep either way
That document stays with you even if you never build the automation, with the real steps and the real exceptions in it
It means that the day Marisa is on holiday or moves to another company, the job doesn't leave with her, and that a new person learns by reading instead of sitting and watching for three weeks
It also means that you, for the first time, really know what happens in there, and that on its own is worth the trouble of going through twenty cases
If you want to see how you get to that document without stopping anyone's work, look at how it works, and if you're wondering what to have to hand before you begin, there's what to have ready before you start