Start with themost boring workflow.
The process you most want to start with is almost never the process you should start with. Why repetition beats ambition, and the one question that finds your most boring workflow in five minutes.
The most exciting process is the worst starting point.
Ask a management team where they want to start automating and you almost always get the same kind of answer: something with customer contact, something with a dashboard, something you can show at a trade fair.
Understandable, because that is the process everyone has an opinion about. Which is exactly what makes it unsuitable. Where everyone has an opinion, there is not yet an agreement. And where there is no agreement there is nothing to automate, because an automation is nothing more than an agreement that carries itself out.
The process to start with is the one nobody talks about. It runs every day, everyone knows how it works, nobody enjoys it, and there is never a discussion about how it ought to go. It is on no agenda at all, precisely because it works the way it has always worked.
That is not a modest choice. It is the choice with the highest chance that something is running three weeks from now, and that is the only currency that counts on a first project. Whatever comes after is easier, because by then you have shown something instead of promised something.
Why boring wins.
Not because it is less ambitious, but because all three things an automation needs are already in place.
Repetition is what it is good at
The same action twenty times a day returns something twenty times a day. An impressive process that runs once a month has to be very good before it earns anything back.
The rules are already known
Someone does this work every day, so the rules live in their head rather than in a workshop still to be scheduled. That skips the phase where projects usually stall: the conversation about how it ought to work.
Nothing burns when it goes wrong
A first automation does things you did not foresee. On a boring workflow you notice and you fix it. On the process your biggest customer depends on, your biggest customer notices.
How to find yours
Do not ask it in a meeting. "What could we automate?" produces strategic answers, and strategic answers are about the exciting process.
Ask it differently. Walk past the people who do the work and ask one question: what did you do this week that you would rather not do again next week? You will not get a vision back, you will get a list, and the same thing appears on it three times. That is the one.
One caveat, because boring is not the same as small. If the most boring workflow only comes around twice a year, it is not the one either. What you are looking for is boring and frequent: work that has become so ordinary nobody notices it any more, but that still costs hours every week. How to add those hours up is in the note about the job sheet, and what building it costs is here.
And one more thing: the boring process is almost never the one management names. That is not a problem. That is why it is still there.
Know which workflow it is? Then this will be quick.
One process, one conversation. Within 48 hours you have a written scope with the number of modules and a fixed price.