Before You Buy a Workflow Automation Tool, Document Your Current Process

First, Let’s Define “Workflow”

Before we get into the pre-work, it’s worth leveling on terminology, because “workflow” means different things to different people.

A workflow is simply the sequence of steps, decisions, and handoffs required to complete a unit of work. It has a start (something triggers it), a middle (people and systems act on it), and an end (an output or decision is produced). Workflows exist everywhere: a purchase request moving from submission to approval to payment. A permit application going from intake to review to issuance. An IT request traveling from help desk to triage to resolution.

Most organizations have hundreds of workflows running simultaneously, across finance, procurement, HR, legal, IT, operations, compliance, and program delivery. Many of them have never been formally documented. They just work, until they don’t.

Workflow Improvement Is One of the Most Impactful Investments a Government Organization Can Make

Government agencies are under constant pressure to deliver more with less. Constituent expectations are rising. Staffing constraints are tightening. And a significant portion of the workforce’s time is consumed by manual, repetitive tasks that could be handled, or at least assisted, by modern workflow automation tools.

The opportunity is enormous. Replacing a paper-based or email-heavy approval process with a digital one. Automating the routing of intake requests so the right person gets the right work without someone manually triaging an inbox. Triggering downstream tasks automatically when an upstream step is completed. Sending status notifications without a staff member having to remember to do it.

These aren’t futuristic capabilities. They exist today, and they are already deployed in agencies across the country.

What makes this topic particularly significant in government is the sheer breadth of applicability. There is virtually no department that doesn’t have at least one workflow that would benefit from improvement or automation. Procurement. Permitting. Grants management. HR onboarding. Budget requests. Facilities management. Constituent services. Case management. And the list of use cases within those departments is effectively infinite. Workflow automation isn’t a niche IT project; it’s a modernization priority that touches every corner of government operations.

The Problem: Most Organizations Skip the Pre-Work

Here’s where things go wrong.

Organizations recognize that a process is broken. The delays are real. The complaints are mounting. Leadership is asking for a solution. So the natural response is to start shopping. Get vendors on the calendar, sit through demos, put out an RFQ, and move toward a procurement.

It’s an understandable instinct. But it’s backwards.

When organizations skip the pre-work and go straight to the market, they significantly increase their risk of landing in one of four costly outcomes:

• The wrong solution. The tool is capable, but it doesn’t map to how the work actually flows. Configurations get forced, workarounds get built in, and the system becomes a new version of the old problem.
• An overpayment. Without a clear scope, it’s nearly impossible to evaluate cost fairly. Vendors price based on assumptions, and those assumptions tend to favor the vendor.
• A timeline that drags on. Discovery happens during implementation instead of before it. Every unanswered question at the contract stage becomes a scope discussion, a change order, or a delay.
• Outright failure. The project stalls, adoption never materializes, or the system is quietly abandoned. It happens more often than anyone publicly acknowledges.

The root cause in almost every case is the same: the organization didn’t have a clear, documented picture of its current process before it started evaluating solutions.

The Steps That Should Happen Before You Ever Talk to a Vendor

Let’s be clear – Buying technology isn’t a four-step process. There’s scoping, stakeholder alignment, vendor management, contract negotiation, change management, and more. What follows isn’t an exhaustive checklist of everything a procurement requires. It’s a framework for some of the foundational pre-work that most organizations either skip entirely or underinvest in. The full buying process is longer and more complex, but it gets significantly harder without this foundation in place first.

High-performing buying teams complete these steps before opening a single RFQ or sitting through a single demo. Skipping them doesn’t accelerate the process; it creates rework later.

Step 1: Document your current process (as it actually exists) — this is where it starts, and where most teams stall

Map each workflow stage from intake to completion. For every stage, identify who owns it, which systems hold the work, what the hard rules and decision points are, and where the biggest delays occur. This is the foundation everything else builds on.

This step sounds straightforward. In practice, it’s the one most teams either skip or do halfway. Why? Because documenting a process as it actually works requires getting people in a room who have never been asked to describe their work in this way before. It surfaces the informal rules, the workarounds, and the hand-offs that exist only in someone’s head. It also takes structured facilitation and a consistent format to capture it in a way that’s usable.

Without it, every step that follows is built on assumptions. And assumptions are what vendor demos are designed to exploit.

Step 2: Translate process reality into formal requirements

Once you know what the process actually does, you can define what the future system must do. This is different from current-state documentation. It’s a forward-looking specification that becomes your evaluation lens. Requirements answer: “what must be true for this to be considered a success?”

Step 3: Align on priorities and constraints

Not all requirements are equal. Before engaging vendors, your team should agree on what is non-negotiable, what is preferred, and what is a nice-to-have. You should also surface constraints early. Constraints such as budget bands, procurement vehicle requirements, integration dependencies, security and compliance thresholds, and timeline.

Step 4: Build your evaluation framework

With requirements and priorities defined, you can create a structured scoring approach before you see any demos. This protects you from being dazzled by a polished presentation and keeps your evaluation grounded in your actual needs.

Only then with this foundation in place does it make sense to open the market.

What “Current Process Documentation” Actually Means

Before any vendor conversation, your team should be able to answer, in writing, for each stage of the workflow:

• Who owns it? Not the department. The role, and who sits in that role today.
• What system holds the work? If the answer is “email” or “it depends,” that is important information.
• What are the hard rules? The thresholds, approval chains, and conditions that change the path, even if they’ve never been formally written down.
• Where does it break? The delays, the manual workarounds, the steps that depend entirely on someone remembering.
• What would “automated” actually need to do? Not what the vendor says is possible. What your process requires.

When this information exists in a structured, honest format, vendor conversations become completely different. Instead of evaluating features in the abstract, you’re matching specific capabilities to specific requirements. You can ask sharper questions, spot gaps earlier, and push back when a demo doesn’t reflect how your work actually flows.

Process Documentation Is the Deliverable

One reframe that changes everything for buying teams: the current-state process documentation isn’t prep work for the project. It is the project. Or at least the first phase of it.

Organizations that invest in this step before going to market arrive with clarity that most vendors haven’t seen from a prospect. They shorten evaluation cycles. They write better scopes of work. And they build configurations that hold up after go-live.

The tool matters less than most people think at this stage. The documentation always matters more than people expect.

 

Looking for a template to get started? → Download the documentation worksheet here