I’ve been working on automating a previously manual process riddled with potential human error and recently I’ve found myself referencing this article from Doug Seven as the poster child for how things can go wrong quickly when the process isn’t very good or your understanding of the system isn’t complete.
Thorough change management practices and peer-reviewed automation can be something that not only saves your time but sometimes your job too. If you can automate it and remove potential human error that’s nearly always the right path. Software can still fail but you can test software and do peer reviews. It’s a little harder to peer review every decision and click someone has to deal with when deploying something into production.
If you haven’t read this before… this is a level of failure you don’t get to see too often.