Map. Redesign how the work should flow before any tool goes in.
A clean workflow with one owner per step, written in plain English, that the team can follow without you.
What this phase is for
Before anything is built, the workflow is redesigned on paper so that it works without you in every step. This is the phase most businesses skip, and it is the one that decides whether the tool you buy next will help or just move the mess faster.
Do it yourself
- Write the workflow as it should be, not as it is. Start from the audit list. Remove any step that exists only because a previous step was late. Merge any two steps done by the same person in the same tool.
- One owner per step. A name, not a team. If two people could do it, one of them is the owner and the other is the backup. If the owner is you for more than a third of the steps, keep redesigning.
- Define the handover. For every step, what arrives, what leaves, and how the next person knows it is their turn. Most leaks in the audit were missing handovers.
- Decide where information is allowed to go. Sort the information in this workflow into public, internal, client and sensitive, and write next to each step which bucket it carries. The tool-tiering page has the buckets.
- Mark the decisions. Anywhere a judgement is made about a person, a price or a risk, mark it. Those steps get a human owner whatever else you automate later.
- Write it in plain English on one page. Numbered steps, owner, tool, what arrives, what leaves. If it needs a diagram tool to be understood, it is too complicated to run.
A clean workflow with one owner per step, written in plain English, that the team can follow without you.
The AI lens on this phase
This is where the AI rules get decided, before any tool is chosen. Which buckets of information may go into which tier of tool, who may connect a new one, and which decisions keep a human. Write those three answers down now and the policy question in Does my business need an AI policy? is already answered.