People often delay getting in touch because they think they need to arrive with something: a specification, a business case, a decision about which tools to use. You do not, and the things people do prepare are frequently the least useful things they could have brought.
What genuinely helps
One process, chosen because it annoys people. Not the most strategically important one. The one that generates the most complaints, or that everyone quietly avoids. Irritation is a reliable indicator of repetitive work.
A rough sense of volume. Roughly how many times a week or month. Order of magnitude is fine — the difference between ten and a thousand changes the answer, the difference between ten and fifteen does not.
Who touches it. Names or roles, and what each one does to it. This is usually the most revealing thing in the whole conversation, because the answer often turns out to be more people than anyone thought.
What currently goes wrong. The exceptions, the arguments, the things that get missed. Exceptions are where a workflow either succeeds or quietly fails, so we are far more interested in these than in the happy path.
One real example. An actual enquiry, invoice or form — redacted if it needs to be. Ten minutes with a real document tells us more than an hour of description, because it shows the messiness that descriptions smooth over.
What you can leave at home
A technical specification. If you have written one, we will read it, but we will still want to see how the work actually happens. The gap between the two is usually where the interesting part is.
A decision about tools. Choosing the technology before understanding the process is the most common way these projects go wrong.
A budget figure. It helps eventually. It is not needed to work out whether the process is worth automating at all, which is the first question.
Confidential data. Please do not send customer records, personal data about your staff, or anything commercially sensitive to a first conversation. Redacted examples are enough, and we will tell you when we need more and how to send it properly.
What happens after
We map the process as it genuinely runs — including the steps that are not in any documentation. We separate the parts that are repeatable from the parts that need judgement. We tell you which are worth automating and, just as often, which are not.
You get a clear picture of the work either way. That is worth having even if you decide not to build anything, which is a decision we would rather you reach on our call than three months into a project.