Operating Brief

Item This lesson
Decision Identify the real workflow and select the smallest point where AI can improve it.
Output A current-state process map and evidence-backed automation candidate.

Workflow Problem

Teams often automate the written procedure rather than the work people actually perform. The documented process may omit copied spreadsheets, informal approvals, repeated clarifications, queue clean-up, and exceptions handled through private messages.

If discovery is weak, AI makes the wrong process faster.

Discover the Work from Four Sources

  1. Documents: SOPs, forms, policies, queue definitions, and service levels.
  2. Records: representative emails, tickets, documents, reports, and correction logs.
  3. Observation: what staff actually click, copy, compare, and decide.
  4. Interviews: why people bypass the formal process and which failures matter.

Do not rely on interviews alone. People describe the intended workflow and forget frequent micro-decisions.

Map the Current State

For each step, capture:

Field Question
Trigger What starts the work?
Input What record or evidence arrives?
Decision What judgment or rule changes the path?
Action What does the person or system do?
Owner Who is accountable for the next state?
Exception What prevents the normal path?
Evidence What must be retained?
Metric How are time, quality, backlog, or risk measured?

Find the Right Automation Point

Good early candidates often involve:

  • converting unstructured intake into a structured record;
  • retrieving the right source for a human decision;
  • preparing a draft, summary, or comparison;
  • detecting an exception and routing it earlier;
  • reducing repeated search or copying.

Avoid beginning with the final approval or irreversible action. Preparation and decision support usually create learning with lower risk.

Harborline Example

Harborline initially describes support triage as “read the ticket and assign a queue.” Observation shows five hidden steps: identify the customer, reconstruct missing context, check VIP status, detect sensitive issue types, and decide whether the service-level clock needs escalation. The AI opportunity is not simply a label. It is a structured intake package plus explicit overrides.

Practice: Produce the Current-State Map

Sample at least ten records and observe at least two people completing the task. Record:

  • the documented process;
  • the observed process;
  • every decision and exception;
  • rework and handoffs;
  • missing information;
  • baseline time and error indicators;
  • one narrow automation candidate;
  • one decision that must remain human-controlled.

The artifact is complete when the workflow owner confirms that it reflects normal work and difficult cases, not only the happy path.

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