The short answer
Brief one named task, not a department. State the hours it consumes in a year, measured rather than estimated. Name the systems it starts and finishes in. State the proportion of cases the automation may reject and who works that queue afterwards. Say which data it may touch, which UK law already obliges most firms to have written down. A brief carrying those five things can be priced by four suppliers and the four quotes will be comparable.
Key takeaways
- Measure the task before you describe it. Time one pass and count how often it runs, and you have an hours figure a supplier cannot argue with.
- Most firms of this size already hold a written process inventory and do not think of it as one: the record of processing activities required by Article 30.
- The exception rate decides the saving. At one item in four falling out, an illustrative 276 hours a year becomes 161.
- Data minimisation is a brief-stage decision, because Article 25 bites when the means of processing are determined rather than when the build starts.
- A brief written from an estimate produces a quote priced against that estimate, and the gap surfaces at go-live.
Article 30 of the UK GDPR exempts an organisation employing fewer than 250 persons from keeping a record of what it does with personal data, and then removes that exemption where the processing is not occasional. Client work in an accountancy practice or a recruitment agency is not occasional by any reading, so a firm of twenty people is generally inside the requirement and usually knows it. What almost nobody does is open that record when a supplier asks how the work currently runs.
Briefs for admin automation fail in a way that briefs for a website do not, because a partner can picture a website and cannot picture a workflow nobody has written down. The result is a document describing a wish, and four quotes that are not comparable because each supplier filled in the same blanks differently.
Measure the task before you describe it
The single most useful thing a firm can put in front of a supplier is an hours figure it produced itself. It sets the ceiling on what the work is worth, and it is the number a partner group will want when the invoice arrives twelve months later. Six lines produce it, in an afternoon rather than a project.
Which single task, named the way the person doing it would name it?
one task
A brief covering "our admin" cannot be priced. It can only be quoted for, which is a different thing.
How long does one pass take, start to finish?
minutes
Time it twice, on different days. Recalled durations are consistently shorter than measured ones.
How many times does it run in a normal week?
times a week
Take it from the system that records them. Practice software will count them for you.
How many weeks a year does it actually run?
weeks
Seasonal work is where hours figures inflate. A January task is not a fifty-two week task.
What proportion of cases will not fit the rule?
per cent
Nobody knows this exactly. A firm that has never guessed at it will accept whatever number the build produces.
Minutes, times frequency, times weeks, divided by sixty
hours a year
This is the number the brief opens with, and the number every proposal has to be set against.
The process inventory your firm already has to keep
A brief needs to say what data the task touches, where it came from, who else sees it and how long it is kept, and a great many firms have already written that down. Article 30 sets out what the record has to contain: the purposes of the processing, the categories of data subjects and of personal data, the categories of recipients, the envisaged retention periods and a general description of the security measures. Read that list as a supplier would and it is a scoping document.
It is better evidence than an interview, because it was written before anybody was selling anything and somebody signed it off. Where the record and the task description disagree, the disagreement is worth more than either: the process drifted and the documentation did not follow, which is the condition in which automating fixes one person's version of the work permanently. That is the same failure that decides which tasks are worth handing to software at all.
Brief the exceptions, because that is where the price turns
A supplier prices the cases the rule can handle. The firm keeps every case it cannot, and those cases are slower per item than the ones that were automated away. They arrive pre-sorted for difficulty, without the rhythm that made the original task quick. Take a purchase invoice routine at nine minutes a pass. It runs forty times a week over forty-six working weeks, which is 276 hours a year, and assume an exception takes fifteen minutes by hand.
0%
276 hours
The number in the proposal. It describes a routine with no awkward suppliers in it.
10%
230 hours
184 items a year fall out and take fifteen minutes each. The saving is still good.
25%
161 hours
Now there is a queue, and somebody owns it. That person was not in the brief.
40%
92 hours
A third of the headline. The build cost did not fall to match, and it will not.
Before you send the brief out
Not sure the hours justify a supplier at all?
Free to your firm. The agency pays us, and only if the relationship works, which is why we would rather tell you the task is a setting in software you already license than introduce somebody to build it from scratch.
Get a recommendationWhat has to be settled in the brief rather than in the build
Article 25 of the UK GDPR requires appropriate technical and organisational measures both at the time of the determination of the means for processing and at the time of the processing itself. The means are determined when the brief is written. Data minimisation, in other words, is a decision the firm makes on paper before a supplier is chosen, and retro-fitting it to a working automation is an expensive way to arrive at the same place.
Four clauses carry most of the weight, and none of them are technical.
- The smallest data set that does the job. Name the fields the automation may read. A supplier given a whole system will use a whole system
- Where the work terminates. The record or the product the output has to land in, named. Capability is not a destination
- Who reviews what, and how the review is evidenced. Anything ending in advice or a signature still needs a person, and the brief should say which person
- What happens at the end of the engagement. Which credentials and configuration transfer, and in what format, if the firm changes supplier
The first two are the ones that separate quotes. A brief written this way also tells you something about the room: the kinds of supplier who answer it well differ from one another, and they file different trade codes at Companies House. The general structure is the same discipline as a brief for any outside specialist, with one difference: here the failure modes are the specification.
When a firm should not brief anyone yet
Two conditions make the exercise premature, and neither is about the supplier.
- Nobody has timed the task. A brief built on an estimate gets a quote built on the same estimate, and the difference between the two shows up as a variation once the work has started
- The process is about to change anyway, through a system migration or a deadline that will rewrite it. Brief the version that will still exist in a year, not the one being replaced
Saying so costs us the introduction fee, since we are paid by the agency and only when a relationship works. When a supplier genuinely is needed, what we assess before recommending anyone, including the cases where we recommend nobody, is set out for professional services firms across the UK.
Frequently asked questions
What partner groups ask us before they write the brief.
What should an automation brief contain?
One named task rather than a department, the measured hours it consumes in a year, the systems it starts and finishes in, the exception rate the firm will accept and who handles the fallout, and the data the automation may touch. A brief stating an outcome instead of a task cannot be priced, so every quote comes back against a different guess.
How do you measure the hours before you write the brief?
Time one pass twice, on different days, and take the frequency from the system that records it rather than from memory. Minutes multiplied by weekly frequency multiplied by the weeks the task actually runs, divided by sixty, gives the hours a year. That figure is the one number in the brief a supplier cannot dispute.
Why does the exception rate matter more than the price?
A supplier prices the work the rule can handle and the firm keeps everything the rule rejects, at a slower rate per item because those cases arrive already sorted for difficulty. Naming the rate the firm will accept, and who works the queue, moves that from a discovery six weeks in to a term in the brief.
Does a firm already hold the process information a brief needs?
Often, and in writing. Article 30 of the UK GDPR requires a record of processing activities covering purposes, categories of personal data and of data subjects, recipients and retention periods. Its exemption for organisations employing fewer than 250 persons falls away where the processing is not occasional, which describes ordinary client work in a professional services firm.
When should a firm not brief anyone yet?
When nobody has timed the task, because a brief written from an estimate produces a quote priced against that estimate. The other case is a task about to change anyway, through a migration or a regulatory deadline. Let the process settle and brief the version that will still exist in a year.
Sources and useful reading
- Article 30, records of processing activities, for what the record must contain, and for the paragraph 5 exemption and what removes it.
- Article 25, data protection by design and by default, for the obligation attaching at the point the means of processing are determined.
- ICO guidance on documentation, for how the record is expected to be kept in practice.
This article is commercial decision support and is not legal or regulatory advice. The hours and exception figures are illustrative and are set out so that you can substitute your own. Whether your firm falls inside the Article 30 requirement is a judgement for the firm.