Most automation projects we get pulled into start the same way: somebody on the team says, "we should automate this." The thing they want to automate is usually a process that runs by hand every Monday — pulling a report, transforming it, sending it to a Slack channel. Six weeks later, the automation project has stalled, and the cause, almost universally, is that nobody on the team agrees on what the manual process actually does. The Monday report has three subtly different versions depending on who's running it that week.
The first useful step in automation isn't writing code. It's writing down the manual process — every step, every decision, every "oh, except when X happens" — and getting the people who currently run it to agree that the writeup is accurate. This documentation step takes longer than people expect, and it's where the real value of the automation project lives. The act of writing it down surfaces the inconsistencies, the institutional knowledge, the edge cases nobody had verbalized, and forces a conversation about which version is correct.
Once the documentation exists and is agreed-upon, the automation gets easy. The code is usually a straight translation of the documented steps. The tests are easy to write because the expected behavior is finally specified. The error cases are easier to handle because they were explicitly listed. The thing nobody warned you about in the abstract — "we'll automate it" — is that the documentation phase is 60% of the work and the code phase is 40%, not the other way around.
The hidden benefit: the documentation outlives the automation. Software gets rewritten. The documentation of what the process is supposed to do becomes the source of truth that survives the rewrite. When you eventually replace the script with a new tool, the new tool is configured against the same documentation. When somebody new joins the team and needs to understand how the Monday report works, the documentation explains it. You didn't just automate a process. You institutionalized a piece of knowledge that used to live in one person's head.