Not replacing roles —
taking the repetitive halfFive kinds of role, split line by line

This map moves actions, not people. A role has never consisted of one thing — take it apart and what can be handed over is the few actions that repeat, while complaints, exceptions, judgement calls and external commitments are all still there, and those are precisely the parts that consume people. So the step from this map to “how many people can we cut” is a broken inference. What genuinely changes is the composition of everyone's time: most of the day used to go on moving things and waiting, and afterwards most of it goes on judgement and exceptions. Whether that should change your headcount depends on where your volume is going, which isn't a question this system answers — in most cases we've seen, the same people absorbed more work. We also advise against writing “remove N people” into a project's objectives: that objective can't be stated openly, and an objective that can't be stated openly is quietly resisted during rollout. Nobody cooperates with something built to replace them. The reverse works far better — put the tool in people's hands and let them use it on the part of their own job they hate most.

Resistance usually isn't about effort. It's about two fears: will it make decisions for me, and will it be used to measure me. Neither is answered by reassurance — it's answered by how the thing is delivered, and our approach is to put it in people's hands rather than install it above their heads. Delivery includes training aimed at business staff, and what it teaches isn't how to operate a system: it's how to hand over the repetitive parts of their own work — reworking copy in bulk, tidying spreadsheets, drafting replies, aligning terminology and translations. Things they already do daily, where the time saved shows up the same day. Templates, wording and parameters are made changeable by them, tuned to their own habits, without waiting for a development queue; and the first person who gets a result out of it goes and shows everyone else, which beats any amount of top-down push. There's also a fixed rule about sequencing: what goes live first is always the part that saves them time, with monitoring and reporting coming later, and the entry point sits inside a tool they already use so nobody has to log into anything new. Finally, the right-hand columns above should be explained before launch — people who know their half is untouched behave completely differently. Once someone realises this is their tool and it makes their own work lighter, they stop needing to be persuaded and start asking you for more of it.

These five are simply where the approach is most settled and the delivery boundary can be described precisely — not the limit of what can be built. The test was never the job title, it's the shape of the task: a clear trigger, a process you can describe, a clear output. Manufacturing, wholesale, export trade, engineering, clinics, law firms, training providers — we apply the same test. Where nothing matches a full line, starting with a single module and one specific task works.

No, and hiring first usually gets the order backwards. What you actually need is someone who understands the business, can describe the process, and has the authority to change it — someone who can answer “why is this step done this way” and “who approves an exception”. The technical side is delivered by us, with training for your existing technical people at handover; it's all built from open standard components, so any engineer familiar with that class of tooling can continue.