Building your first workflow

A case type defines the stages. A workflow defines what happens in them.

The shape of a workflow

Each step has three parts:

• A trigger. What starts it — entering a stage, a signal arriving, a deadline approaching, or a person choosing it.
• An action. What happens — send correspondence, request a document, assign to a team, move stage, ask a digital worker to draft something.
• A gate, optionally. Who has to approve before the action takes effect.

Build one

1. Workflows → New workflow, and pick the case type it belongs to.
2. Add a step. Start with the acknowledgement, because it is the one that is always the same and always late when done by hand.
3. Set the trigger to Case created.
4. Set the action to Send correspondence and pick a template.
5. Leave the gate empty. An acknowledgement is not a decision.
6. Save and activate.

Every case created from now on acknowledges itself on receipt.

What to automate first

Automate the coordination, not the decisions. Chasing, filing, diarising and acknowledging are where cycle time actually goes — queue time was never about the hard calls.

A reasonable first three:

1. Acknowledge on receipt.
2. Chase a missing document after five working days.
3. Warn the owner two days before a stage deadline, rather than telling them after it passed.

Testing

Activate on one case type and watch it for a week before rolling it wider. Workflow steps are recorded on the case timeline, so you can see exactly what fired and when — including what fired at 3am, which is usually the interesting part.