The difference between automating a process and just making it faster

A process can get faster without actually getting better — and a lot of "automation" projects quietly fall into this trap: they speed up a flawed process instead of fixing it, which means the same mistakes now just happen more quickly.

Why speed alone can be the wrong goal

If a manual process has an error built into it — wrong information gathered at the wrong stage, an approval that doesn't actually catch the problems it's meant to catch — automating that process faithfully just means the error happens faster and more often, not that it's gone. Speed was never the actual problem; the flawed logic was.

What's worth doing before automating anything

Ask what the process is actually supposed to achieve, and whether the current steps genuinely achieve it, before automating those steps as-is. Automation should lock in a process that already works well and simply remove the manual effort of running it — not preserve a flawed process at higher speed.

A quick test

If you automated this process exactly as it runs today, would the output be something you'd trust completely? If the honest answer is "not quite," the process needs fixing first. Automating it as-is just means you'll trust the wrong output faster.