This is half the answer, and it is the half nobody publishes #
Almost every page on this subject is written by somebody who is paid when you automate something, which is why almost every page concludes that you should. We are in exactly that position, so it is worth being direct: a good proportion of the jobs businesses bring to us should be left alone, and saying so early is cheaper for everyone than finding out later.
The positive version of this test, the two axes of repeatability and judgement, is set out in how to tell which jobs are worth automating. This page is the list of things that fail it, in the order we see them.
1. Work that happens rarely #
The economics are unforgiving here and they are not really about software. Any handover costs something to specify, build and check, and that cost is paid once. What repays it is frequency. A job that runs four hundred times a year is a different proposition from the same job running four times, even if each occurrence is identical.
The trap is that annual jobs feel enormous because they arrive all at once and disrupt everything. Year end, an audit, an insurance renewal. The disruption is real and the total hours are usually modest.
2. Work that is about to change #
A process being reshaped by new software, a new regulation, a new premises or a new member of staff should be left until it settles. Building against a moving process means building twice, and the second build is rarely cheaper than the first because the first one has to be unpicked.
The same applies to a business that is genuinely growing. A process that works at the current volume and will not work at three times the volume is not a process worth casting in software; it is a process worth redesigning. There is a separate hazard in things changing underneath a finished build, which we cover in what happens when the tools change underneath you.
3. Work nobody owns #
If no single person can say how a job is supposed to run, there is nothing to hand over. What gets built in that situation is somebody's best guess at the process, and when it produces an outcome two people disagree about, there is no one to adjudicate.
The symptom to watch for is a job that three people describe three different ways, each convinced theirs is the standard version. That is not a reason to give up on the job. It is a sign that the useful work is agreeing the process, and that the agreement is worth having whether or not anything is ever automated.
4. Judgement wearing routine's clothes #
Some work looks mechanical from a distance and is not. Deciding whether to chase a particular client again this week is not a rule, it is a read on a relationship. Deciding which of two urgent jobs the van goes to is not a rule, it is a read on which customer will forgive the delay.
These are the decisions that keep a business alive and they are the last thing anyone should try to hand over.
The useful move is to split rather than abandon. Gathering the information the decision needs is usually rule shaped and usually the bulk of the elapsed time. The decision itself stays where it is.
5. Work where being wrong is expensive and unrecoverable #
Anything that sends, spends or deletes deserves particular caution, and some of it should simply stay manual.
A wrongly filed document is an annoyance. A wrongly sent message to a client is a relationship. The reasoning behind where that line sits is in what should always wait for a person.
6. A configuration problem in disguise #
A surprising share of repeated admin exists because two systems that could talk to each other do not, or because a setting was never switched on, or because somebody built a workaround years ago for a limitation that no longer exists. None of that needs a model and none of it needs a consultancy. It needs somebody to spend an afternoon in the settings.
It is worth checking this before anything else, because it is the cheapest possible fix and because discovering it after a build is an expensive way to learn.
What to do with the jobs that fail the test #
Failing the test does not mean living with the job forever. It usually means one of three things.
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Simplify it
Plenty of work that cannot be automated can be reduced by changing what the business asks for in the first place.
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Stop doing it
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Hire for it
Plenty more is genuinely a job for a person.
If the conclusion is a person, the relevant question becomes what that person's week should look like, which is a different exercise from this one and a more useful one than buying software you do not need.