What to ask before automating
Ask what happens if someone skips a step. If you notice immediately, it is well built. If you find out weeks later, the problem was just moved.
There is one question that separates automation that takes work off your hands from automation that hides it: «what happens if someone skips a step?». If the answer is «you notice immediately», it is well designed. If it is «you find out later», the problem was moved somewhere else and made harder to see.
Where that question comes from
From getting it wrong myself. I added three new pages to this site, and TWO files kept the list of pages typed by hand: the one that tells Google what exists on the site, and my own checking program. Adding a page was not adding a page: it was adding a page and remembering to write it down in two more places.
What I believed
The file had a comment saying: adding a page is one line here.
What turned out to be true
Nobody adds that line. And the day they do not, nothing turns red: the file comes out perfectly well formed, with one page missing.
The three pages would have been live and working, but the site would not be declaring them to Google. Not invisible —they are linked from the menu, and a crawler finds them sooner or later— but unannounced, which means depending on someone stumbling onto them. On a brand-new page, that difference is weeks.
Why an incomplete file is worse than a broken one
A broken file shouts: something fails, someone fixes it. An incomplete file looks identical to a complete one. That is the whole problem, and it is the same in any business.
A list someone has to remember to update is a list that will eventually be wrong. That is not a discipline problem: it is a design problem.
What this looks like in your business
It is exactly the same pattern as the spreadsheet where someone writes down which payments came in, the price list that lives in a file and also on the website, or the booking closed over WhatsApp that «has to be entered into the system later». The most expensive case is availability published in several places at once: that is where the room sold twice comes from, and it is why in systems for hotels and lodging the first piece is a single calendar.
- None of those things fail with an error: they fail by going quietly out of date.
- The day they fail, everything else still looks normal.
- And whoever keeps them right almost never gets the credit, because their job is that nothing happens.
Four questions worth asking
- What happens if someone skips a step? Look for the answer «you notice immediately».
- Which piece of data ends up written in two places? That is the one that will drift.
- What does the system find out on its own, and what does a person have to find out?
- If this breaks on a Tuesday, how do I hear about it — and how soon?
None of them is technical. All four are answered in plain language, and whoever cannot answer them in plain language has not finished designing what they are about to charge you for.
And one I ask myself
My checking program already had the lesson written inside it, from a previous time. It was written down, and it happened again in a different file weeks later. Leaving the lesson where the problem happened does not stop it from happening ten metres away — which is why both lists now build themselves, and the only way for a page to be missing is for it not to exist.
There is a similar case that is not this one and is worth telling apart: when the process is well built and still stopped serving you, because the business grew. That has its own explanation in when your system stops working.