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Automating processes with software is hard

We have decades of experience trying to automate processes. My biggest lesson is that automation is not about the easy and known flow, but about exception handling.

But part of what that career taught me—from some examples like automating finances in excel, to document templates, to creating good looking charts in PowerPoint, scheduling in Outlook, workflows in SharePoint…all fairly basic tasks—is that the baseline is easy but highly unsatisfactory. Automation will come but the breakthrough is going to look a lot like product management showing up and spending a huge amount of energy on what the inputs to a system are and what it means to have and handle exceptions. Everyone who ever told me it was standard ("I [big boss] always let people use my blocks of time MW 10-12") simply wasn't thinking about how the organization contorted around their rules and how every reschedule was a cascade of scrambling and frustration.

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