Pain vs. Wants vs. Needs: Prioritizing Your Automation Workflows

The hype around artificial intelligence has put organizations' idea-generation engines into overdrive. While there’s no shortage of ideas, what organizations are short of are the technical skills, resourcing and tooling to execute these improvement ideas.

What helps is collecting the influx of ideas from across the organization and then prioritizing them into a structured pipeline of work. It is much easier to drink from a pipeline than from a firehose — yet for many, the current situation probably feels like the latter.

What makes the situation even more manageable is when you also categorize them. Categorization of ideas makes it easier to determine the appropriate treatment and technology solution to bring them to life. AI might be the answer in some cases — but it could just as easily be automation.

Selecting the right enabling technology will influence the extent to which you realize and maximize the value of these improvement ideas.

AI Isn't the Answer to Everything

The ability to measure the degree of improvement an action results in of the key factors in any improvement work is to be able to measure the degree of improvement that an action results in. The old adage of ‘You can’t measure what you can’t manage’ rings true in this context.

Improvement opportunities in organizations tend to follow a certain trajectory. They start by formally mapping out a business process so that every part of it is well understood: who are the stakeholders, who is responsible for executing each part, how much time does each part of the process take, how much does it cost to run, for example.

A lot of organizations have gone down the mapping route and are now looking for what is the next logical step for improving that process. How can they get more juice from each squeeze?

The introduction of some level of automation is often the next logical step, whether it’s simple task approval, document creation or translation. Whatever it is, if you can prove that you’re going to remove some manually laborious minutes, hours or days, it probably provides sufficient justification to pursue the improvement work.

AI is an attractive means of improving a process. Yet organizations run the danger of trying to introduce AI into a process too soon, without first exhausting simpler (and more value-accretive) process automation enhancements.

Part of that boils down to awareness. AI has crossed into mainstream consciousness, resulting in greater awareness of what AI promises to do versus what automation can actually do.

Enterprise AI is a nascent space: many product demonstrations and experimental use cases romanticize the transformative benefits of the technology. Yet we still have few tangible examples to hold onto. When people become aware of what simpler automation in an online form or mobile app can do, they reassess how to best execute on an identified list of process improvements to reduce their time-to-value.

Awareness is massively important. People don’t know what they don’t know, so generating awareness even at a relatively high level helps teams that manage and execute processes to critically assess the most likely way to solve problems and achieve the improvements they desire.

Pains vs. Needs vs. Wants

One strategy to tame the firehose of ideas is to categorize them into three buckets — pain, needs and wants.

Organizations are often encouraged to identify and prioritize pain points. Drilling into the human feeling of "this hurts me every time I do it" can create a sense of urgency, priority and importance. Teams identify the pain in every process, and the pipeline of work grows and grows. However, for many of these things, there is no easy off-the-shelf solution, so a pipeline composed entirely of pain points can slow down improvement programs.

By contrast, organizations that group improvement ideas more widely can prioritize according to various factors. Teams can then get quicker wins before undertaking more complex improvement objectives.

Anyone who's created a household budget will recognize dividing ideas into needs, pain and wants. Once categorized, it’s a matter of determining the prioritization split. The split will depend on the individual organization. However, it makes sense that most improvement ideas that get actioned in the first instance are needs-based.

Needs are business critical. They keep the lights on. You may find some overlap between needs and pain — the necessities of doing business probably do highlight pain, so there might be quite a considerable Venn diagram there.

The important thing is to separate out ideas that are wants. These experimental pursuits can still be actioned, but perhaps in more limited numbers and through different vehicles such as hackathons or in allocated innovation time. Delivering on wants should not come at the expense of things that speak to the needs and pains of the organization.

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