Decide What Is Worth Automating.

When a Decision Sprint Is the Right Starting Point

• You have many automation ideas, or many vendor pitches, and no credible way to compare impact, effort, risk and priority.
• One core workflow is clearly expensive, slow or fragile, but nobody has quantified what fixing it is worth.
• Leadership is being asked to approve automation or AI spend without a business case it trusts.
• Teams have started automating isolated tasks without redesigning the underlying process.

The Sprint is for established businesses with real operational complexity: workflows that span multiple people, teams, systems, or vendors, and enough volume that automation can affect cost, capacity, speed, quality, or scale.

Study and Choose

The Decision Sprint covers the first two stages of the SCALE Framework. We study the operating area in enough depth to know what is actually happening, then choose what is worth pursuing and why.

Study

We map the current process end to end: the steps, handoffs, systems, documents, exceptions and controls, and where cost, delay, rework, or error are actually created. We work with the people who do the work, not only the people who manage it.

Choose

We identify the strongest automation and process opportunities inside that area, assess their business impact, implementation effort, risk and dependencies, and rank them. The output is a decision: pursue, investigate further, or stop, and in which order.

Quantify

We build the business case on a measured baseline: volumes, time, cost, error rates, cycle times and capacity. Benefits are stated in operating terms leadership and finance can hold us to.

Automation Is Usually a Portfolio, Not One Project

Most companies do not have one large automation project. They have many smaller opportunities spread across an operation. Some are worth doing now, some later, some not at all.

The Decision Sprint starts with one core workflow or operating area, finds the contained opportunities, sizes them, and ranks them by business impact, implementation effort, risk, dependencies, and expected payback. Over time, the same cycle is repeated across the broader operation.

What You Leave With

• Current-state map of the selected workflow or operating area, including handoffs, systems and exception paths.
• Quantified baseline: volumes, effort, cycle times, cost and error drivers.
• Ranked opportunity portfolio with impact, effort, risk, dependencies and expected payback for each candidate.
• Business case for the recommended initiative(s), written for the CEO, COO and CFO.
• Target workflow and solution direction: what should be redesigned, automated, integrated, bought, configured or built, at the level needed to decide, not to implement.
• Execution plan: scope, sequencing, roles, required specialists and the decisions leadership will need to take.
• A clear recommendation: pursue, investigate further, or stop.

The output is yours whether or not we continue together.

How the Sprint Runs

A Decision Sprint is a fixed-scope engagement led directly by the founder, with a defined start and end. It involves a small number of structured working sessions with leadership, the process owner and the people doing the work, access to relevant data and systems, and a final decision session with leadership. We handle the analysis; your team’s time is deliberately kept light.

We typically start small. The initiatives a Sprint identifies are usually focused, may involve roughly 20–100 hours of specialist implementation work, and target a 3–6-month payback. Those are working-qualification benchmarks, not quotes or guarantees; the Sprint is where the real numbers are established. Where ongoing involvement follows, it typically runs at a cadence of one to two days a week.

What the Decision Sprint Is Not

• Not a tool evaluation. We start from the operating problem and economics, not from a platform.
• Not an AI strategy deck. The output is a decision and a plan leadership can act on.
• Not a disguised implementation sale. If the economics do not justify automating, we will say so.
• Not a mandatory first step. If you already know what needs to happen, start with an Execution Mandate instead.

After the Decision

Many Sprints lead into an Execution Mandate, where we architect the future process, lead implementation across your teams and vendors, and embed the new way of working. Others end with a ranked portfolio your own team can execute, or a well-founded decision not to proceed. Companies with a broader set of initiatives may move to ongoing Fractional Automation Leadership.

If you would rather start smaller, the free Workflow Review looks at one workflow and gives you a brief and a pursue/investigate/stop recommendation.

FAQ

Do we need to have chosen a workflow already?

No. Part of the first step is agreeing where to focus. If you have several candidates, we help you choose the one with the strongest likelihood of success.

What do you need from us?

A senior sponsor who can make decisions, access to the process owner and frontline team, and relevant data and systems. Your team’s time is kept deliberately light.

Will you recommend specific software or vendors?

We define the solution direction and the criteria that matter. Where vendor or platform selection is needed, that belongs to the Execution Mandate, where we can lead the evaluation.

What if the answer is “don’t automate”?

Then that is the recommendation. A well-founded decision not to spend is a good outcome.

Can you run a Sprint on an initiative that is already underway?

Yes. A Sprint is often the fastest way to reset a stalled initiative: re-establish the baseline, the business case and the decision that was never clearly made.