Article
I've made a lot of automations, and some of them have been a complete waste of time. I'm not even talking about bad copy or an agent saying the wrong thing.
Sometimes the workflow can't run from beginning to end. The AI stops at a step, needs a person, or never completes the thing it was supposed to do.
Before adding AI, I check three things: what starts the work, what it needs to produce, and whether the steps actually serve that result.
Write down the trigger
What starts this workflow? An email arriving, somebody calling in, or a person walking into the front office?
Put it down. If work can enter through different places, account for each one. A process that begins with an email doesn't cover the person who walks through the door unless you've included that entry point.
If you haven't caught the different ways the work starts, you're missing part of the process.
Name the finished result
A document is made. An email is sent. Somebody gets contacted.
Be clear about which outcome this workflow is meant to produce. Without an outcome, you haven't established what the workflow is doing for you or where it should end.
Then look at the steps between the trigger and that result. Can the work reach the end, or does it stop somewhere and need a person to carry it on? That was the problem with some of my own automations: they weren't completing the work.
Keep unrelated work out of the middle
I've made this mistake with testimonials. I'd be building a process and decide I also wanted to collect a testimonial from a client, so I'd put the testimonial steps right inside that workflow.
Those steps should have been a separate workflow, triggered at the appropriate point.
When you review a step, ask whether it serves the outcome you've named. If you're loading another process into the middle, give it its own trigger, steps and outcome. You can still connect the two without making them one big workflow.
Take one workflow you want to automate and write down its entry points, its finished result, and the steps in between. Check where it stops and which steps belong in a separate process before you add AI.