Every business has at least one process that only works because Sarah does it. Ask Sarah to explain it and she’ll say “it’s hard to describe.” Ask her to write it down and you’ll get a list of steps that misses half the decisions. That’s not Sarah’s fault. Memory is a terrible narrator.
Why writing it yourself doesn’t work
When you know a process well, your brain skips the boring bits. You don’t write “open the supplier portal, wait for it to load, check whether the session has timed out, log in again if it has” — you write “log in to supplier portal.” Those skipped bits are exactly where new hires go wrong and where automation falls over.
The fix is simple: don’t ask someone to write. Ask someone else to watch and ask questions.
The interview method, step by step
You need two people. The person who owns the process (the doer) and someone who doesn’t know it at all (the interviewer). The interviewer’s job is to be genuinely confused.
- Book 45 minutes. Longer and attention drifts. If the process takes more than 45 minutes to walk through, split it into stages and book one session per stage.
- Ask the doer to do it, not describe it. “Can you just do the next one while I watch?” is worth more than “can you talk me through it?” Real work surfaces real steps.
- Interrupt constantly. Every time the doer touches something — a spreadsheet, an inbox, a system — ask: “What is that? Why that and not something else? What would happen if you skipped it?”
- Write what you see, not what they say. If they say “I just check it looks right” but you see them cross-referencing two tabs, write down the two tabs.
- End with the edge cases. Ask: “When does this go wrong? What do you do then?” Edge cases are where the real expertise lives.
Add time and cost to every step
A process document without numbers is just a story. You need to know where the time goes before you can decide what to fix.
Against each step, write two things: how long it takes, and how often it happens. Then multiply them. A step that takes two minutes but runs 200 times a month costs 400 minutes — nearly seven hours. That’s the kind of number that makes a decision obvious.
You don’t need precision. A rough estimate beats nothing. In our supply-chain document-extraction build, the client estimated conservatively that each document took 30 minutes to process manually. Volume was doubling month on month. You don’t need a spreadsheet to see that’s a problem worth solving.
If you want a quick formula: minutes per instance × monthly volume ÷ 60 = hours per month. Multiply by your hourly cost to put a £ figure on it.
Structure the output
Once you’ve got your notes, organise them into three columns:
- Step — what actually happens, in plain language
- Input / output — what goes in and what comes out (a file, a decision, an email)
- Time & frequency — your numbers from above
That’s it. No flowchart software required. A shared doc works fine. The point is that it’s written down somewhere, by someone who had to ask questions to understand it.
What to do with it
A documented process does three things immediately. It lets someone else do the job. It shows you where the bottlenecks are. And it tells you whether a step is a candidate for automation — because anything that takes a fixed input and produces a predictable output is worth a second look.
Not every step should be automated. Some steps need judgement. But you can’t make that call until you can see the whole thing laid out in front of you.
If you’ve got a process you suspect is costing more than it should — in time, in errors, or in the fact that only one person can do it — a workflow audit is a good place to start. We go through exactly this method with you, put numbers against every step, and tell you honestly what’s worth fixing and what isn’t.