Pick the right first tasks
Good first tasks happen often, follow clear rules and waste the time of someone skilled. Typical examples are copying enquiries into a CRM, sending reminders for unpaid invoices, creating a folder and checklist for each new client, and building a weekly report from the same sources.
- Frequent: it happens at least weekly.
- Rule-based: you can write down what to do in each case.
- Low risk: a mistake is easy to spot and undo.
Avoid starting with work that needs judgement on every case, or that nobody has written down yet.
Test before it runs alone
Run the workflow on ten real past examples and compare the result with what a person did. Check the odd cases: a missing field, a duplicate, an unusual name. Fix what you find before you switch it on.
- Keep a log of every run, so you can see what happened.
- Add an alert for failures, so a broken workflow does not stay quiet.
- Switch on a small share of cases first, then widen.
Decide where a person stays involved
Anything that sends a message to a customer, spends money or changes a record can wait for an approval step. You can loosen that later for steps that have run cleanly for weeks.
Workflows that act with no approval point are where small errors turn into expensive ones.
Try this with your own team in an hour
You need a list of tasks and the people who do them.
- Ask each person for the three tasks they repeat most, and how long each takes in a week.
- Score each task: how often it happens, how clear the rules are and how bad a mistake would be.
- Pick the one with the highest time cost and the lowest risk. Write its steps and its odd cases on one page.
- Decide where the approval point is, and who checks the first ten runs.