It’s the boring automation projects that survive

Every digital leader in the country has sat through a pilot review by now. The demo works. The room nods. Somebody asks what it costs to scale, and the meeting veers away from the subject. Six months later, the pilot is still a pilot, and the person who ran it has moved on to something else.

The projects most likely to survive are the boring ones. The ones built to solve a problem, not just implement a solution. These are often purely automated rather than AI-driven. Processing of applications and referrals reduced from weeks to hours. New starters get set up the moment they're confirmed. They’re not exciting enough for a conference talk, but they come with a number a board can check, and that number tends to still be true a year later. The exciting pilot, built around a brand-new use case, often struggles to produce the same clean before-and-after.

The wrong business case can kill an automation project and trigger a reluctance to try again. A pilot can work perfectly and still never become a programme if nobody built an argument that would withstand questioning by someone who controls the budget and was not in the room for the demo. What was the process costing before? What will it cost after? How do we know? Those questions need answers before the pilot starts, not after it has impressed those who saw it run.

Getting to those answers starts with a close look at the processes you’re running to identify the biggest headaches, the greatest resource drain, where you’re falling short of expected timeframes, or where the service to your users isn’t up to scratch. This understanding, coupled with industry experience and knowledge of what is already proven, means you can identify the processes that will deliver the most beneficial returns in the shortest time. Nobody wants to wait for months on end for a process that delivers very little. You want quick results that get the right people on board to carry on and do more.

This is where we think EAS is useful to a public sector organisation earlier than you might assume. Not at the point where a decision has already been made, and you just need a delivery partner to build the thing. Before that, when the question is still which process is worth automating first, and what a realistic case for it looks like before anyone commits budget or reputation to it. We have worked across the NHS, universities and waste management organisations long enough to have a good instinct for where the quick, provable wins tend to sit, and where they don't. We find the best results come when we combine experience and instinct with really listening to you, learning your processes to find the absolute best starting point.

None of this needs AI agents or a transformation programme. Sometimes it’s one team, one process, done properly, with a number at the end that holds up under scrutiny. It’s a smaller ambition than most vendors will pitch this year, but it’s also the one that will still be running in eighteen months.

If you are working out which of your organisation's pilots deserves to become a programme, or whether the case for one has been made yet, we would be glad to talk it through.

This article is sponsored by EAS

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