Today our goal is to investigate why your workflows fall apart when you start mapping your processes. Spoiler: all can be easily overcome with proper planning.
To the reading:
🔎 Most common mistakes people make when creating workflows
We at Fluix have been helping businesses with automation for 9 years, and this is a common pattern we often see.
Despite the industry, company size, use case or business goal, peoplerepeat the same mistakes when getting started with workflows:
1. Lack of process clarity
With no clear understanding of steps, actions, stakeholders and documents involved, you end up with overcomplication, oversimplification, or missing critical steps.
2. Too rigid workflows
No flexibility makes it difficult to accommodate changes, unique situations, or emergencies.
3. Unprepared documents
Paper forms that haven’t been digitized, or unsupported digital formats become a blocker of task assignments.
4. No integrations set
If you plan to take some data for your tasks from the third-party tools, you need to integrate with them in advance, and not on the day you're mapping your process.
5. Ignoring the user experience
It’s always your end users who execute the workflow. If they don’t know how to use the tool, or don’t understand their assignments, you end up with frustration and delays.
Having these creates a false impression that automation isn’t for you, and you need to stick to good old paper + manual ways. You don't.
What you do need is to make sure you consider these important moments.
• Know the process. Clearly outline the purpose of the workflow, and the desired outcomes. Break it down into stages and tasks, identifying dependencies and potential bottlenecks.
• Add everyone involved. Include all people - from office teams to field teams to guest partners - in the workflow, and make sure you properly set their accounts.
• Account for locations. Consider the (possible) geographic dispersion of teams. Include instructions for remote work, local regulations, and site-specific conditions.
• Watch tech compliance. Make sure people have the necessary devices with the required OS, and the app downloaded. Mind that many field workers use their personal devices for professional purposes. They need to be compliant as well.
• Get all the necessary documents ready, in the required format. Prepare paper files to be converted into digital templates, and digitise them in advance.
This may seem obvious. But you can’t imagine how often people reach out to our support team to only find out that their task isn't saving because they didn't add to the system anyone to complete it.
