Example: a marketing department's catalog

Eleven processes, one row each. This is what a department has after a first pass: enough to see what exists, who owns it, and where the dependencies are. One of the rows, mkt/social-campaign, is written out in full in social-campaign.md.

Two rows say documented rather than running, which means the process is written down but nobody has run it against the document yet. A catalog that says a process is running before it has run is one people stop believing, so the state is recorded as it stands.

The dependency graph#

mkt/competitor-review ─┬─> mkt/campaign-planning ─┬─> mkt/social-campaign ─┐
                       │                          ├─> mkt/email-campaign ──┤
                       ├─> mkt/social-campaign    └─> mkt/event ───────────┤
                       ├─> mkt/email-campaign                              │
                       ├─> mkt/website-update                              │
                       ├─> mkt/brand-review                                │
                       └─> mkt/quarterly-readout <─────────────────────────┘

mkt/claims-register ───┬─> mkt/social-campaign
                       ├─> mkt/email-campaign
                       └─> mkt/website-update

mkt/lead-routing ──────> mkt/quarterly-readout
mkt/agency-brief ──────> mkt/social-campaign

What the graph says#

Two processes have a lot of other work depending on them. The competitor review feeds six others, and the claims register feeds three of the four that write anything a customer will read. Neither runs very often: the competitor review sixteen times a year, the claims register ten times a quarter. If you ranked this catalog by how often each process runs, both would come near the bottom, and both are still worth automating early.

The high-volume work is somewhere else. Lead routing runs four hundred times a week, more than everything else in the catalog put together. It is already autonomous, which is what usually happens to the busiest process in a department, whether or not anyone planned it.

Two processes wait on the same person. Social and email campaigns both report never, and in both cases it is the same legal approval done by the same reviewer, which puts one person in the path of sixty runs a quarter. The catalog cannot automate that away. What it does tell you is that the thing to fix here is how that review is staffed, rather than the automation level.

Every process feeds something else. That is either a good sign or a sign that the first pass missed the work that stands on its own. Since events and agency briefing are still documented rather than running, it is worth checking which.

Where this department would start#

The order that falls out of the graph does not start with the process that runs most often:

1. mkt/claims-register. Three processes wait on it, and every one of them has a policy rule that cannot be satisfied without it. It is also the cheapest to improve, because it runs ten times a quarter and currently produces a spreadsheet.
2. mkt/competitor-review. Six dependents. Today it is supervised and takes a fortnight; most of that fortnight is gathering, which is exactly what a work board does well.
3. mkt/website-update. Thirty runs a quarter, already supervised, and no never phase in it. This is the first process in the catalog that could plausibly reach autonomous end to end.

Lead routing is left alone deliberately. It is already autonomous and running four hundred times a week, which means any change to it is a change to the highest-throughput thing in the department, and the catalog gives no reason to touch it.

What the first pass got wrong#

Worth recording, because every department's first pass gets something wrong:

• mkt/social-campaign and mkt/email-campaign were originally one row called "campaign execution". They have the same trigger but different owners and different channels, so they are two.
• "Content production" was a row until it turned out to have no trigger of its own. It is the produce phase of three other processes, not a process.
• mkt/agency-brief was missed entirely on the first pass, because it is the only process in the department that mostly happens in email.