Most ops teams automate the wrong thing. They take a slow, annoying process and make it faster. Great. Now the thing that shouldn’t exist runs faster.
SpaceX does it the other way around. Elon Musk boiled the company’s method down to five steps he calls the Algorithm, and he uses it on everything, not just rockets. Walter Isaacson wrote it up in his biography. The whole trick is doing them in order:
- Question every requirement. Make a real person put their name on it. “Legal wants it” or “finance wants it” doesn’t count. And the smarter the person who asked, the harder you should push back, because that’s the rule nobody ever questions.
- Delete the step. If you don’t end up putting at least 10% of it back later, you didn’t cut deep enough.
- Simplify what’s left. Only what’s left. Don’t spend a minute tidying up something you should have thrown out.
- Speed it up. Almost anything can go faster, but not until you’ve done the first three.
- Automate. Last. Always last.
A finance team I worked with spent two days a month reconciling their billing tool against the ledger by hand. So they automated the matching. Saved them a day. But the two systems only drifted apart because refunds got entered in both, slightly differently. Fix that upstream and the two-day job becomes a twenty-minute check. The script was just speeding up work that shouldn’t exist.
Do it backwards and you just make waste run smoothly. Do it in order, over and over, and the work mostly takes care of itself.
So before you buy the tool or write the script: question it, cut it, clean it up. Then automate.
Source: the SpaceX “Algorithm,” from Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk, shared by Marc Andreessen.