“Discovery” is one of those words that can mean anything from a genuine piece of analysis to a sales meeting with a nicer name. Here is precisely what ours involves, so you can decide whether it is worth your afternoon.
What you bring
One process. Not a strategy, not a shortlist of tools, not a budget.
It helps if you can bring the person who actually does the work rather than only the person who manages it. Managers describe how a process is supposed to run. The person doing it knows about the spreadsheet they keep on the side, the customer who always emails instead of using the form, and the step everyone skips when it gets busy. That gap is usually where the opportunity is.
What happens in the room
We walk the process end to end, in order. What starts it, what happens next, who touches it, what they open, what they type, where it waits. We keep asking “and then what?” until the process is finished. This is slower and more boring than it sounds, and it is the part that matters.
We ask what goes wrong. Not in theory — in the last month. Which cases were painful, what caused it, how it got resolved. Exceptions are where automation projects die, so we would rather meet them on day one than in week six.
We count things. How many a day, how long each takes, how often the awkward version happens. Rough numbers are fine; the point is to tell a step that runs 200 times a week from one that runs twice.
We find the decisions. Every process has a handful of moments where someone chooses something. We separate the ones with a right answer from the ones needing judgement, because those get built completely differently.
What we do not do
We do not talk about which AI model to use. We do not demo anything. We do not ask you to fill in a requirements template.
We also do not pretend everything is automatable. Roughly a third of the processes we map have one or two steps worth automating rather than an end-to-end opportunity, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a programme.
What you leave with
A map of the current process, step by step, including the parts that only exist in someone’s head.
Each step tagged: automate, augment with AI, keep human, or delete. The delete list is often the most immediately useful thing in the document, and it costs nothing to act on.
A view on sequencing — what to do first based on volume and effort, not on what is most interesting to build.
An honest read on whether this is worth doing at all.
What it costs and what happens next
The first session costs you the time. If there is something worth building, we will tell you what we think it involves. If there is not, we will say so, and you will still have the map.
There is no obligation to continue, and the map is yours either way. We would rather be the people who told you honestly that your process was fine than the people who built you something you did not need.
One thing worth knowing beforehand
The single most common surprise in these sessions is discovering that two teams believe the same process works in two different ways. Neither is lying — the process genuinely forked at some point and nobody wrote it down.
That is worth finding out even if you never automate anything.
Bring us a process and we will map it with you.