Your Automation Starter Plan

What you are leaving with

Five lessons in, you can choose a job worth automating, describe how the machine works without waving your hands, build one, notice when it has gone quietly wrong, and say out loud which steps are never allowed to run alone. That is more than most people who have been doing this for a year.

What you do not have yet is a plan, and a plan is what turns this from an interesting afternoon into something still working in November. So this lesson produces one. Two automations, an owner for each, a definition of success, a weekly check and a stop condition.

Write it outside this site. On paper, in a document, in the shared drive where your team keeps things. Nothing here stores anything, there is no account, and a plan that lives in a browser tab is a plan you will lose. Copy the blocks below into whatever you actually use.

Why two, and not five

Two is the number that survives. One is fragile, because if it turns out to be a poor choice you conclude the whole idea does not work for you. Five is worse, because you will not check any of them properly and one will be quietly wrong within a month.

Pick two from the safe shapes in lesson one. Something that routes, sorts, summarises, notifies or copies. Different enough that they do not both fail for the same reason, small enough that either could be switched off on a Friday without anyone panicking.

Fill this in once per automation. Two copies. Keep them somewhere
your team can find without asking you.
AUTOMATION 1
WHAT IT DOES, in one sentence a new starter would understand:
..........................................................
TRIGGER, the thing that starts it:
..........................................................
STEPS, in order, one line each:

.......................................................
.......................................................
.......................................................
THE AI STEP turns .................... into ....................
WHAT IT MAY TOUCH, and read only or read and write:
..........................................................
OWNER: ...................  DEPUTY: ...................
SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE, one measurable thing:
..........................................................
WEEKLY CHECK: every .......... at .......... , by ..........
STOP CONDITION, we switch this off if:
..........................................................
OFF SWITCH: it is turned off by ..........................
I have tested this myself: yes / not yet
AUTOMATION 2
Same again. If you cannot fill in a line, that is the gap,
not the form being awkward.

The owner is a person, with a name

The single most common way an automation dies is that it belongs to everybody. Everybody means the queue grows for three weeks and nobody feels rude about ignoring it.

An owner is one named human. Their job is not to run the automation, which is rather the point of it. Their job is to notice. They do the weekly check, they empty the needs a human pile, and they are the person who decides to switch it off. Name a deputy too, because holidays exist and an automation with an absent owner is an automation with no owner.

Success, stated before you start

Decide now what would make you say this was worth it, and write down one thing you could actually look at. Enquiries answered the same day, up from six in ten to nine in ten. Two hours a week back for whoever was sorting the inbox. Nothing missed for a fortnight. Any of those will do. What will not do is it feels quicker, because in three months feels quicker will be indistinguishable from we got used to it.

The stop condition, decided while you are calm

This is the part nobody writes down and everybody needs. When something starts going wrong, the moment is bad for making decisions. There is pressure to keep it running because switching it off means somebody does the work by hand tonight. So you agree the trigger in advance, when nothing is on fire, and then you only have to notice it rather than debate it.

A stop condition is a specific, checkable line. Two weekly checks in a row find an error. The needs a human pile passes ten. The team stops reading the channel. A customer notices before we do. Any one of those, and it goes off while you work out what happened.

EVERY WEEK, ten minutes, in a slot in the owner's calendar.
[ ] Pick three items at random from the last seven days
[ ] Open the originals and read them yourself
[ ] Is what the automation said true of each one?
[ ] Is the needs a human pile shrinking or growing?
[ ] Write one line in the shared note: date, what you found
EVERY MONTH, twenty minutes.
[ ] Is the success measure moving? Look at the number
[ ] Has anything upstream changed? New form field, renamed
folder, a new person sending things in a different way
[ ] What is the usage costing, and is it what you expected
[ ] Ask the team one question: are you reading these, or
have you started ignoring them
[ ] Has either stop condition been met? If yes, stop it today
EVERY SIX MONTHS, half an hour.
[ ] Does this job still need doing at all
[ ] Are the connections still needed, and still as narrow
as they were when you set them up
[ ] Is the owner still the right person, and still here
[ ] Would a new starter understand the plan without you

Where to go after this

Once the two are running and dull, add a third. Then consider the jobs you vetoed in lesson one, the expensive ones, and build them properly with an approval step rather than avoiding them forever. That is the natural progression: the safe shapes first, the valuable ones second, with a person in the loop exactly where lesson five put them.

One page per automation. Written in week one, not week fifty.
WHAT IT DOES and why we built it: ........................
WHICH ACCOUNTS it is connected to: .......................
WHO OWNS those accounts: .................................
WHERE THE INSTRUCTION lives, so it can be edited: ........
HOW TO TURN IT OFF, in one sentence: .....................
WHAT BREAKS if it stops: .................................
WHO DOES THE JOB BY HAND if it is off: ...................
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE WRONG so far, and the fix: .........
Give a copy to your deputy. Ask them to read it and tell you
which line they do not understand. Fix that line.

The Automation Builder badge

Finish the quiz below and the Automation Builder badge is yours. The more useful thing you leave with is two filled in plans, each with somebody's name on it, and the habit of ten minutes on a Friday. The badge is a nice square on a screen. The Friday habit is what stops you discovering in November that something has been quietly wrong since August.