Process archaeology
We watch the work being done and write down what actually happens, including the exceptions nobody documented. Often this alone removes two steps.
Automation
Workflow & process automation
The recurring manual work that consumes a week every month, rebuilt as durable jobs that log what they did, recover from their own failures, and ask a person when they are genuinely unsure.
The situation
The process that only one person can run
Almost every organisation we meet has a handful of processes held together by a spreadsheet, a scheduled script on somebody's machine, and one employee who remembers the order of the steps. It works, until that person takes leave or the input file changes shape.
The usual failure is not the automation itself. It is everything around it. No record of what ran, no way to re-run a single failed item, no idea whether yesterday's job half-finished. We start there.
Scope
What the work includes
Durable orchestration
Long-running workflows that checkpoint their state, so a failure at step nine resumes at step nine rather than step one.
Idempotent activities
Every unit of work can safely run twice. No double payments, no duplicate imports, no second confirmation email to a customer.
Human escalation paths
Anything ambiguous lands in a review queue with the context attached, instead of being guessed at or silently dropped.
Observability from day one
Structured logs, run history and alerts that name the failing step, so support does not begin with 'can you check if it ran?'
Handover documentation
A runbook covering how to re-run, how to backfill, and what each alert means, written for whoever is on call next year.
2wks
To a first automated process in production
1
Named engineer who owns the workflow end to end
100%
Runs recorded and individually re-runnable
Deliverables
What you are left holding
Every engagement ends with artefacts you own outright, whether we continue together or not.
- Deployed workflows with infrastructure as code
- Run history and alerting dashboard
- Runbook and re-run procedures
- A written map of the process before and after
Typical stack
What we build it with
Chosen for support horizon and hiring pool, not novelty. If your team already runs something equivalent, we will use yours.
PythonDurable orchestrationMessage queuesInfrastructure as codeCI/CD
Questions
What clients ask first
Can you automate a process that is still changing?
Yes, and it is often the right moment. Automating forces the ambiguity into the open. We build the stable core first and leave the moving part manual until it settles.
What if the automation makes a mistake?
Then it should be recoverable and visible, which is most of what we design for: every run is recorded, every item can be re-run, and anything uncertain goes to a human queue rather than through on a guess.
Do we need to be on a particular cloud already?
No. These patterns transfer between providers. Tell us what you already run and we will say plainly how much of our experience carries over.
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Is this the problem you have?
Describe it in three sentences and we will tell you what the first two weeks would look like.