Why not just automate the process we already have?
Because a large share of the steps in a long-running manual process exist to correct an earlier step, and those are the ones that cannot be automated usefully. Automating the whole chain reproduces the correction steps, which means you have paid to make a workaround permanent and faster. The redesign is what tells you which steps were the work and which were the scar tissue.
How do you document a process nobody has written down?
By watching it and by reading its output, in that order. Interviews give you the official version, which is usually the version from before the last two exceptions were added. The artefacts give you the real one: the tickets, the spreadsheets people keep on the side, the email threads where the decision actually happened. Where the two disagree, the artefacts are right.
Does this apply to our software development lifecycle?
It is one of the two places we see the biggest change, and the honest version is unglamorous. The gain is rarely in generating code faster; it is in review, in the archaeology of why a module does what it does, and in the tests nobody wrote. Those are reading problems rather than writing problems, which is what the model is actually better at than a person on a deadline.
What stays human in the redesigned process?
Anything where being confidently wrong is expensive and the error would not be visible downstream. The design rule we use is that a step may be automated when a wrong output is either caught by a later step or cheap to reverse. Steps that are neither keep a human, and the useful move is usually to make them smaller rather than to remove them.
How long does this take and what does it cost?
The documented redesign of one process is the two-week engagement at €4,900, net of VAT, and it ends with a process you can act on whether or not you build anything. Automating what survives is the pilot engagement from €15,000 and is a separate decision made after you have read the redesign.
What if the redesign says the process should just be deleted?
That happens, and it is the best outcome available. Some processes exist because a system could not do something in 2014 and now can, and the right answer is a configuration change rather than an agent. We will say so, the engagement ends early, and you have spent two weeks to avoid building something that should not exist.