Most organisations have people who are extraordinarily good at getting things done. They know which person to chase when something is stuck and which spreadsheet contains the information nobody can find in the system. They know that when a particular request lands in the shared inbox, it needs to be forwarded to Sarah before anyone does anything else with it and they know which approvals can take three days unless you send a Teams message at just the right moment.
These people are invaluable, and that may be part of the problem. Because over time, organisations become remarkably good at building processes around the resourcefulness of their best people. Instead of fixing the friction in the process, we rely on experienced employees to navigate around it.
The work still gets done, customers are served, deadlines are met and reports are produced. From the outside, everything appears to be working.
But underneath, some of your most capable people may be spending an extraordinary amount of their working lives doing things that really shouldn’t require their time at all.
When did the workaround become the process?
Most inefficient processes don’t begin as inefficient processes, they evolve.
A new requirement appears, so somebody creates a spreadsheet to track it. Another team needs to approve something, so an email gets added to the process. A customer needs updating at a particular stage, so someone makes a note to remember to contact them. A new system is introduced, but it doesn’t quite talk to an old one, so an employee manually moves information between the two.
Individually, none of these decisions seems particularly significant. In fact, they’re often perfectly sensible responses to an immediate problem, but multiply them across departments, systems, customers and years – and something interesting happens:
The workaround becomes the way things are done.
Before long, nobody is particularly surprised that a straightforward process involves checking three systems, updating two spreadsheets, sending four emails and asking Dave whether he’s approved it yet – it’s simply “the process”.
And because your experienced people know how to navigate it, the inefficiency can remain remarkably well hidden.
The expensive habit of throwing good people at bad processes
When an operational process isn’t working as efficiently as it should, one of the easiest solutions is to add human effort.
- Volumes increase? Someone spends a few more hours processing requests.
- Reporting gets more complicated? Someone builds a better spreadsheet.
- Customers start chasing? Someone takes responsibility for monitoring the inbox.
- An approval is regularly delayed? Someone remembers to chase it.
The problem is that these small additions of human effort accumulate. Soon, people who were hired for their judgement, experience, customer knowledge or specialist expertise are spending significant parts of their day moving information around, checking whether things have happened and reminding other people to do things.
None of these activities is necessarily difficult, that’s precisely the point. If you have talented, experienced people doing work that requires very little of their actual talent or experience, there is an opportunity cost that won’t necessarily appear on any operational dashboard.
The process is getting done. But what isn’t getting done because those people are busy keeping it moving?
Your systems may be digital. That doesn't mean your processes are.
Most organisations have invested heavily in technology. There may be Microsoft 365, CRM, ERP, finance systems, HR platforms, document management, workflow tools, customer portals and a growing collection of specialist applications.
Yet somewhere between those systems is often a human being. They download information from one place and upload it somewhere else. They read an email and decide which team it should go to. They copy a customer reference number into another application. They check whether a document has arrived. They update a spreadsheet so everyone knows where a case has got to.
On paper, the organisation has undergone digital transformation, but in practice, people are acting as the integration layer.
This is one reason operational inefficiency can be so difficult to spot. There may be no obviously “manual” process left. Nobody is filling out paper forms or wheeling filing cabinets down corridors. Instead, the manual work is happening on screens – and because it happens inside modern software, it can look deceptively like digital work.
The people who make broken processes look good
There is another reason these problems can remain invisible for years: good people compensate for them.
Experienced operations teams become incredibly skilled at anticipating problems. They know where bottlenecks usually occur and intervene before they become serious. They maintain their own reminders, create informal communication networks, keep lists and double-check things because they know what happens when they don’t.
In other words, they provide a human safety net around the process, which is valuable, but it also creates an interesting paradox:
The better your people are at managing inefficient processes, the harder those inefficiencies can be to see.
Customers may still receive a good service, management reports still arrive on time, compliance requirements are still met and SLAs remain green, but maintaining those outcomes requires constant invisible effort. That effort becomes particularly noticeable when somebody leaves, goes on holiday or simply becomes overwhelmed.
Suddenly, the process that “always worked perfectly well” doesn’t, because what has actually disappeared isn’t the process, it’s the person who knew how to hold it together.
Growth has a habit of exposing the cracks
Processes built around human intervention can work surprisingly well at relatively low volumes. If there are 20 requests a week, somebody can keep an eye on the inbox. If there are ten approvals outstanding, somebody can chase them. If a monthly report requires data from four places, somebody can spend Friday afternoon pulling it together.
Then the organisation grows and twenty requests become 200. Ten approvals become 100. Four data sources become nine.
The usual response is to add more people and sometimes that’s absolutely the right answer. Growing organisations need growing teams, but there is an important distinction between hiring people because you have more valuable work for humans to do and hiring people because the existing process requires more human administration.
If operational headcount is increasing broadly in line with transaction volumes, it’s worth asking why. Are you genuinely adding human expertise, or simply adding human processing power?
What should your people actually be doing?
A useful way to look at AI and automation isn’t to begin with technology at all. Begin with people.
Look at your most experienced operations staff and ask what you are really paying them for.
Their judgement? Their ability to manage complex exceptions? Their relationships with customers? Their specialist knowledge? Their ability to spot risk? Their capacity to solve problems when the answer isn’t obvious?
Now look at what they actually did yesterday. How much time was spent checking, copying, updating, chasing, rekeying, routing, reconciling and reporting?
There will always be administrative work in any role. The goal isn’t to create some mythical organisation in which humans only spend their days contemplating fascinating strategic problems, but the balance matters. The more routine coordination you can remove, the more human capacity becomes available for the work where people genuinely add value.
That is where AI and automation becomes much more interesting than simply “making things faster”.
Business Process Automation has changed too
For a long time, automation meant taking a predictable, rules-based task and making a computer do it: if X happens, do Y.
That remains useful, and many organisations still have enormous opportunities to automate relatively straightforward and linear workflows, but the possibilities are now that much broader.
AI can interpret information that arrives in less structured formats, with agents gathering information from different sources, completing defined tasks and handing work back to people when human judgement is required. Modern platforms can coordinate activity across people, systems and AI agents, rather than treating each as a separate world.
That doesn’t mean every process should suddenly be handed to AI, but it does mean the dividing line between “work a system can do” and “work a person has to do” has moved. Processes that may have required human intervention when they were designed five or ten years ago may no longer require it today. And that makes now a very good time to look again at what’s going on in your own organisation.
Start with the friction, not the technology
One of the easiest mistakes to make is to begin an automation initiative by asking what a particular technology can do.
A more useful question is: where are our people losing time?
Look for the places where work slows down because somebody needs to move information, check something, chase somebody or work out what happens next. Look for spreadsheets that have quietly become business-critical. Look for shared inboxes that function as unofficial workflow systems.
Look for processes where the phrase “you just need to know” appears regularly during training. Look for reports that take hours to produce despite containing information the organisation already holds. And pay particular attention to the tasks everybody finds mildly irritating but nobody considers important enough to fix.
Those small frustrations, multiplied across dozens of people and hundreds of working days, can represent an enormous amount of operational capacity.
The question isn't whether your people are busy
Your people are probably busy, but the more interesting question is what are they busy doing?
In many organisations, there is a considerable gap between the work people were hired to do and the work the organisation’s processes require them to do. Closing that gap isn’t fundamentally about reducing headcount, it’s about using the people you already have more intelligently.
It’s about giving experienced employees more time for customers, exceptions, decisions, improvement and growth and less time for administration that exists simply because nobody has redesigned the process yet. Your best people will always be the ones who step in when something needs fixing, but perhaps the next thing to fix is how much you rely on them to do it.
Where is your operational time really going?
At jaam automation, we help organisations identify the processes where manual work, disconnected systems and unnecessary intervention are quietly consuming operational capacity and explore where process automation, AI and agents could take that work off people’s hands.
If you suspect some of your best people are spending too much of their day keeping processes moving, an Operational Process Assessment is a good place to start.
We’ll help you look at how the work actually happens today, identify the friction and bottlenecks and pinpoint where automation and AI could give valuable time back to your team.
Using decades of business process automation experience and tools from the Microsoft technology stack including Power Automate, Copilot and Power Platform, the team at jaam helps operations leaders to fine-tune departmental process to save time, reduce rework, increase turnaround times and improve SLA compliance.
Where is your operational time really going?
Let’s uncover the hidden friction holding your team back and find the automation opportunities that will make the biggest difference.
