How to get the most out of a workflow review
Ours is free, but your team's time isn't. How to prepare, what we'll ask, and the one thing that determines whether the report is worth anything.
A workflow review is two weeks of watching and counting: how work actually moves through your business, where it stalls, what it costs when it goes wrong. Whether you do one with us or with anyone else, preparation is the difference between a report that gathers dust and one that pays for a year of decisions.
Before anyone arrives
Pick the irritation, not the strategy. Come with the job that already annoys you — the inbox that backs up, the thing that gets retyped, the question customers keep ringing about. Reviews that start from a concrete irritation finish with concrete numbers; reviews that start from "we should explore AI" finish with a slideshow.
Warn the team, and say the true thing. People who think they're being measured for redundancy will show you the official process. People who've been told "we're trying to get rid of the boring parts of your week — show them everything, especially the workarounds" will show you how work actually happens. The gap between those two versions is where all the value hides.
Nominate a decider. Two weeks of goodwill evaporates if the report lands on a desk where nobody can say yes or no.
What a reviewer should ask you
Expect short conversations with the people doing the work — not workshops, not management interviews. Expect counting: how many arrive a day, how long each takes, how often something goes wrong and what happens next. Expect interest in the spreadsheet nobody admits to and the checklist that lives in one person's head. If a reviewer spends the fortnight talking only to managers, you're buying a summary of what management already believes.
The one thing that decides everything
Honesty about the workarounds. Every business runs on unofficial fixes — the shared login, the copy kept in someone's downloads folder, the step everyone skips on busy days. These aren't embarrassments; they're the most useful data in the building, because they show exactly where the official process fails. A review that only sees the official version will recommend automating a fiction.
What a good report looks like
Ranked, numbered, and specific: this task, this many times a week, this long each, this error rate, this is what fixing it would take — and, crucially, this one isn't worth automating, here's why. A report with no "don't" in it wasn't a review; it was a sales document with a fortnight's costume. Ours is free and you keep it either way, but hold anyone's version to that same test.
How this was made
Drafted by our research agent from the sources above, then edited, fact-checked and approved by a human before publishing. We publish this note on every article because we think you should know.
More articles
Is our data safe with AI? The questions that actually settle it
Not a reassurance piece. The five questions to put to any AI supplier in writing, what good answers look like, and the red flags that end the meeting.
Don't marry the model
Every AI pitch leads with a brand name. But models age like phones, not buildings — and the one question that matters is what happens the day you want a different one.
Chatbot, copilot, agent: what the words actually mean
Three words that get used interchangeably by people selling you things. They are not interchangeable, and the difference is exactly where the value is.