A report that documents every workflow you are running

The situation

A mature student system runs a great many workflows: the automatic steps that fire when a status changes, a document arrives or a date passes. They are added one at a time, over years, by different people.

Eventually an auditor, a new manager or an upgrade project asks a simple question: what is running in production, and what does each one do? Without an inventory, the honest answer is a long silence followed by a spreadsheet nobody trusts.

What I built

A self-service audit report that classifies and documents the production workflow inventory.

• Read from the system itself. The report is built on the workflow definitions as they exist in production, so it stays current in a way a separate document does not.
• Classified. Workflows are grouped by what they do, so a reader can find the ones that matter to their office.
• Self-service. Staff run it themselves when they need it. It does not depend on asking the one person who knows.

Safeguards

The report only reads. It changes nothing in the workflows it describes, and it runs against the same data the rest of the reporting layer uses.

The result

The production workflow inventory is classified and documented in a report that operational and audit staff can run for themselves. A later consulting engagement carried the same report into Power BI, under the same read-only rule.

What I would tell another school

Before you automate anything new, find out what is already automated. In my experience the most expensive workflow problems come from two rules, written years apart, that nobody knew were touching the same record. If you want a quick read on your own estate, the ten-question workflow health self-check on the workflow automation page takes a few minutes, and your answers stay in your browser.