Therefore, rather than focusing on automating what’s easy, focus on automating the boring parts (unlike you, computers love repetition), the difficult parts (reduce error-prone steps), and the parts that need to happen when you would rather be asleep. As a human, you are better than computers at improvisation and being flexible, exercising judgment, and coping with variations. So, don’t fret over not being able to automate deciding which of four paths to take when that decision is purely a judgment call. Instead, automate the four paths but leave the selection process to you!

Documentation as automation lowers the bar for what can be automated, enabling you to improve tasks you would have avoided in both the Leftover Principle and the Compensatory Principle.

Ambiguous Requirements

The computer scientists reading this piece might be wondering why I’m not recommending a formal require-ments-gathering stage or other more rigorous software-engineering best practices.

The reality is that an organization’s IT environment is usually so opaque and amorphous that requirements cannot be written beyond a basic statement of desired results. The first time one attempts to use an API call is more a matter of trial and error than following instructions. Nothing works the first time. It is hours (or days) of guesswork, exploration, and discovery. Nearly every operating system, framework, and IT system contribute to this mess. IT does not live in a world of high school physics where one has the luxury of an infinitely large, flat, frictionless surface. IT lives in a world that is a squishy swamp of vendor promises and “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” choices, all made worse by authentication systems that seem to be designed to work only on sunny days.

Early in the discovery process it is
not obvious exactly what to do, what
will work, or how long it will take to
code. It is more exploration than rote
execution. It reminds me of a framed
sign that hung in my father’s chemistry
lab that read, “If we knew what we were
doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”
Automation and documentation
democratize the work, lowering the
bar so that others may do the task.
Any positive progress through the
four phases enables more people on a
team to do a task, thus enabling you
to distribute work among your peers
and reduce single points of failure.
You might be the only person with the
knowledge and experience to do the
task, but a little documentation can
empower others to do it instead, even
if they don’t have a deep understand-
ing of the technology. Even if the
documentation covers only the most
common situation and is full of warn-
ings such as “This procedure won’t
work if the user has [insert technical
details]” or “If you get the following
error, don’t try to fix it yourself. Call
Mary or Bob.” Future updates to the
document can cover those edge cases.
You don’t need everyone on the team
to have your years of experience, just
the wisdom to follow directions and
contact you if they get stuck.

These benefits save you time in ways other than just making the process faster. They make you more efficient, reduce the work for the entire team by reducing the complexity that must be managed, or create a work-force multiplier that enables other people to take work off your plate.

By creating a culture of continuous improvement, constantly taking baby steps along the four phases, the work becomes less stressful and easier to manage. While the other reasons listed here are quite logical, what motivates me to maintain this discipline is more emotional: I want to reduce stress and have more time for creativity and joy.

The Leftover Principle

Focusing on automating the easy parts means the work left for humans is the difficult stuff. That means automation just made life worse for you. 2 Ironic, eh? Weren’t computers supposed to make life easier? This is called the Leftover Principle, as discussed in this column in 2015.3

The solution to this is the Compensatory Principle: People and machines should each do what they are good at and not attempt what they don’t do well. That is, each group should compensate for the other’s deficiencies. 1

By creating
a culture of
continuous
improvement,
constantly taking
baby steps along
the four phases,
the work becomes
less stressful and
easier to manage.