It’s so easy to automate the wrong things…

Automation is tough, mainly because it’s so easy to automate the wrong things. Here are the three basic principles to get you started:

Automate the routine, the repetitive, and the risky. It’s this last part we forget to automate most often. It’s obvious that we should automate the routine and the repetitive, but it’s less obvious that we should automate tasks that carry the highest level of risk, like a release process–otherwise a human has to foresee all the things that can go wrong.

Never automate management oversight. Management oversight requires a human touch. You can automate tools that inform management oversight, but judgment on how to oversee and steer has to be reserved for humans.

Don’t forget autonomy when you focus on automation. Instead of automation, you may actually need to create team autonomy. What autonomy does is that it battles bureaucracy. And bureaucracy can be as much an efficiency killer as complex manual processes.