Bring Real Examples, Not Abstract Requirements

"We need something that handles this."

That sentence can start a useful conversation, but it cannot scope useful work. It points toward pain, not evidence. It says the current process is frustrating, slow, inconsistent, or too dependent on one person. That may all be true. But before anyone can recommend an agent, a software tool, a workflow change, or no build at all, the work has to become visible.

The better sentence is: "Here are the last five times this happened."

Real examples are the raw material of a good Workflow Assessment. They show what the workflow actually does, not what everyone hopes the future system will do. Requirements lists often describe the desired ending. Examples show the operating truth.

That difference matters because the workflow is the product. A system is not useful because it satisfies a sentence in a requirements document. It is useful because it receives real inputs, handles ordinary variation, marks exceptions, produces something reviewable, and moves work to the next responsible person.

Requirements Hide The Weird Parts

Abstract requirements usually sound cleaner than the work.

"Summarize inbound requests." "Classify leads." "Prepare weekly reports." "Route support questions." "Review applications." These phrases may be accurate at a distance, but they hide the parts that decide whether a system will help.

Real cases expose input variance. One request arrives with every field filled out. Another arrives through an email thread with attachments missing. A third uses a customer's private vocabulary. A fourth is technically complete but obviously suspicious to the experienced person who reviews it. The requirement said "classify requests." The examples reveal what classification has to survive.

Real cases expose missing data. The spreadsheet has a blank column. The CRM record is stale. The policy document conflicts with the template. The source file lives in a folder only one person knows. These are not implementation details. They are part of the job.

Real cases expose judgment calls. What counts as good enough? Which exception needs approval? When should the system stop instead of guessing? Which outputs are safe to draft and which require a human decision? Those questions often stay invisible until the team looks at a specific case and remembers how much interpretation happened along the way.

Real cases expose approval delays and quality expectations. Sometimes the problem is not generating the output. The problem is that nobody knows who can approve it, what evidence they need to see, or what a trustworthy result looks like. If that review habit is not named, a new system will only move the confusion to a nicer interface.

What To Bring

For a focused assessment, bring 3-5 examples of the workflow.

Bring one ordinary case. This shows the baseline: what usually starts the work, what information arrives, which systems are touched, who handles the request, and what output is expected.

Bring one good output. This helps define quality. A good output shows what the team already trusts, what format is useful, what details matter, and where human judgment improved the result.

Bring one bad output. This is not for blame. It is for diagnosis. A bad output shows what failure looks like: missing context, wrong source material, unclear ownership, poor routing, weak review, or a rule nobody wrote down.

Bring one edge case if possible. Edge cases are valuable because they reveal boundaries. They show where the normal path breaks, where an approver gets pulled in, where a policy is ambiguous, or where the system should stop.

Bring supporting artifacts. These can be forms, emails, tickets, reports, spreadsheets, templates, policies, screenshots, prompts, call notes, CRM records, or whatever the team actually uses. The artifacts do not need to be clean. The messy ones are often the most honest.

Finally, identify who touched the work. A good example includes the people and roles involved: who received it, who clarified it, who transformed it, who reviewed it, who approved it, and who used the result. Workflows are made of responsibility, not just data.

Examples Protect The Buyer

Examples are not homework for homework's sake. They protect the customer from paying for a polished answer to the wrong problem.

Without examples, it is easy to build the requested feature and miss the bottleneck. The team asks for summarization, but the real issue is that nobody trusts the source documents. They ask for routing, but the hard part is that ownership changes by exception type. They ask for an agent, but the workflow only happens twice a quarter and should probably remain manual for now.

Examples make those discoveries cheaper. They let the assessment test the idea against reality before a build exists. They also make tradeoffs visible. If a system can handle the ordinary cases but must stop on the edge cases, that may still be useful. If every case is an edge case, the buyer should know that before paying for implementation.

Later, examples become acceptance criteria. A serious build should be tested against real cases, not just a happy-path demo. Can the system gather the right inputs? Does it flag the missing field? Does it produce the review packet in a useful format? Does it stop where approval belongs? The examples brought into the assessment become the first proof points for the build.

The Rule

If the system cannot be tested against real cases, it is probably not ready to be scoped.

That does not mean every workflow needs perfect data or months of history. It does mean the team should be able to show the work as it actually happens. A few real examples can reveal more than a long requirements document because they carry the texture of the process: missing inputs, exception paths, handoffs, review habits, and quality expectations.

Bring the real examples. They are where the useful system starts.