Don’t Automate Your Tasks!

Don’t Automate Your Tasks!

Yes! That’s right. Stop wasting energy on automating your tasks. Stop thinking in spreadsheets for your problems. Don’t throw away hours of your time thinking of incredible situations to lessen that daily work.

Instead of all this, think about your PROCESSES!

Yes, this is the focus for any good organization and productivity gain project.

Thinking about tasks and forgetting that they are part of something bigger usually generates redundancy, rework, or the purest state of simply “throwing your time away”.

But why such a radical vision? Are spreadsheets bad?

Isn’t automation one of the great tools for increasing productivity?

Yes, it is! But we must remember that technology can be great at solving problems that did not exist before! Computers alone can’t automate anything. Investment in equipment without a good strategy can be a very bad business.

The focus should be on viewing what we do as parts of “parent tasks”. We should not look at the task “Post invoices to a control sheet”. But rather know the process of “Receiving Invoices from suppliers” and know that posting them to control is part of this larger process. There is a flow of data, information (data and information are different things!), and documents.

We need to think about the whole. Basically:

– What is the reason for what we do?

– Who are our customers (including internal customers)? And their requirements?

– Who are our suppliers (including internal ones)? And their requirements?

Many of the tasks we perform share information with other industries. The data we need may already be available without having to generate a new control. Or, by adding just one piece of additional data to an existing control, we can save hours of work for the client of our information.

It is common to associate the simple transfer of data to a computer with automation.

This is an archaic and incorrect way of thinking, and it can be very damaging!

Do we need to have the same control of bills duplicated between the warehouse and the accounts payable staff? Do we need to have 2, 3, or 5 people handling the same information for different sectors?

First of all, you have to get your house in order! Find out what are the needs and requirements for the processes. Understand who does what and WHY! After that, we understand the data flow and the information generated. Then we organize the processes and finally create the tools that are needed or that can bring improvements to the processes.

Is this or just throw computers into the middle of chaos…