Process Automation Coach: Plan Before You Build
A manager emails a purchase request to a director. The director replies “OK”. Procurement acts on it.
Simple enough—until someone asks which version of the request was approved, when the decision was made, or where to find the record. Then the team searches Outlook, forwards a few messages, and tries to reconstruct the process from memory.
This is the sort of problem that sends people straight to Power Automate. I would start one step earlier.
What are we trying to automate?
“Automate purchase approvals” is a reasonable objective. It is not yet a process description. To design a useful workflow, we also need to know:
What starts a request?
Who submits it, and who has authority to decide?
What information must the decision maker see?
What happens when information is missing or a request is rejected?
Which decisions must remain with a person?
What record will the organisation need afterwards?
Some answers may be unknown at the start. That is fine; the trouble begins when an attractive flow diagram quietly turns those unknowns into de facto assumed business rules.
A practical example
Take the email approval above. The confirmed problem might be that requests are handled manually and there is no reliable decision history.
A sensible first proposal could be to assign each request a reference, send it to the right approver, record the decision and notify the requester. The director still decides whether to approve. The workflow handles the routing and record-keeping.
That is a useful direction. It is not yet a license to invent approval thresholds, escalation times, mandatory fields, or a SharePoint structure. Those choices need to be checked with the people who own the process.
That is also why I don't think AI should be handed a vague sentence and asked to produce a “complete solution”. It can help organize the discussion, expose gaps, and suggest options. Someone still has to decide which option fits the organization.
Why I built the Process Automation Coach
I built the Process Automation Coach to help people move from a rough idea to a process description they can challenge and improve.
You can describe what happens today in plain language. If you are unsure what details to include, use the request template. The Coach works through the process in stages: what is known, what could be improved, whether automation is appropriate, and how to describe the resulting workflow.
You can add information as you go. If you cannot answer a question, say so; there is no benefit in guessing. At the end, you can save the conversation as a PDF to review with colleagues or use in a discussion with IT or a potential implementation partner.
The current version is a limited pilot, available in English and Ukrainian. You can try it without registering. Please do not enter passwords or sensitive personal data.
What you should take away
The most valuable output may be a question the team has not yet answered: Who owns exceptions? What counts as approval? Where should the decision be recorded?
Those questions are much cheaper to resolve while the workflow is still a description than after you build a flow around the wrong assumptions.
Try the Process Automation Coach with one process you know well. If its proposed steps do not match reality, correct them. That is precisely the point of working through the process before building it.
Comments