Automating Paperwork Left the Real Bottleneck Untouched, Engineer Warns

A software team automated their change-request process, replacing forms and spreadsheets with a pull request system that handled notifications, approvals, and evidence collection automatically. Despite the overhaul, lead time from request to deployment stayed exactly the same, because the true delay was a weekly Thursday approval board meeting that the project never addressed. The automation also made the problem harder to fix — the old spreadsheet drew complaints and created pressure for change, while the new dashboard looked polished and made a four-day wait feel routine. Engineer Serguey Shinder argues this is a common failure mode: technical teams tend to automate the parts of a process that frustrate them, not the parts that are actually slow. He now recommends mapping real wait times from data before building anything, and acknowledges that fixing human decision-point delays requires political conversations, not engineering solutions.