Map your current workflows

Before you can automate effectively, you need to clearly understand what you're currently doing manually. Mapping your current workflows helps you identify pain points, bottlenecks, and opportunities for automation. This process creates a baseline that you can use to measure improvement and ensures you don't miss critical steps when implementing automation.

Identify processes to map

Start by identifying the key processes that are candidates for automation. Focus on processes that are frequently performed, error-prone, time-consuming, or repetitive. Common candidates include infrastructure provisioning and configuration, application deployment processes, monitoring and alerting setup, security scanning and compliance checks, and database backup and recovery procedures.

For each process, create detailed documentation that includes what the process accomplishes, who performs it, when it's triggered, and expected outcomes. Document each action taken during the process, tools and systems used, decision points and conditional logic, and handoffs between team members. Include required permissions and access, dependencies on other systems or processes, common failure points and troubleshooting steps, and time estimates for each step.

Identify pain points and prioritize

As you document each process, look for problems like steps prone to human error, inconsistent execution of the same process, and lack of validation or verification steps. Identify inefficiencies such as unnecessary manual steps that could be automated, redundant processes or duplicate work, bottlenecks where processes get stuck, and time spent on administrative tasks rather than value-added work. Look for knowledge gaps including processes that depend on institutional memory, steps that are unclear or poorly documented, and dependencies on specific individuals.

Create a prioritization matrix based on impact, effort, and risk. Consider how much time the process currently consumes, how critical it is to business operations, and how much value automation would provide. Evaluate how complex the process is to automate, what tools and systems are already available, and what skills and resources are needed. Assess how risky the current manual process is, what the impact would be if the process fails, and how much testing and validation would be required.

Next steps

In this section of Define your processes, you learned how to identify and document your current manual processes to establish a foundation for automation. Map your current workflows workflows is part of the Define and automate processes pillar.

Refer to the following documents to learn more about process definition:

• Define infrastructure as code to understand what infrastructure supports your processes
• Standardize workflows to create consistent processes across teams
• Build your team culture to establish the foundation for successful automation