Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation – Dan Slimmon
Every ops team has some manual procedures that they haven’t gotten around to automating yet. Toil can never be totally eliminated. Very often, the biggest toil center for a team at a growing …
Remember reading this via the orange site. It’s great advice.
Automating a complex process from scratch is hard to get right the first time. Or second. Or third. Meanwhile, no work is actually getting done. The pragmatists on the team lose faith in the endeavor. Things go back to the old way, until one day something breaks due to human error or some crucial piece of tacit knowledge goes missing when a colleague leaves.
This approach keeps everyone happy, offering at least a sliver of hope that things may someday improve.
It also gives you clarity in your processes. One of the biggest problems with automating stuff is finding out what exactly is done by employees for a certain task. If your script captures that, you have done the hardest part.
