Automation Plateaus: Friction Metrics That Reveal Stalled Workflows
Automation maturity models love to hand you a level. Level 2. Level 3. Congratulations, you've arrived. But here's the thing I keep seeing on the ground: a team can be at 'Level 4' on a spreadsheet and still feel stuck. Tickets sit in queues. Handoffs take days. The bots run, sure, but the workaround still flows through Slack and retyped emails. So let's ditch the level talk for a moment. What you need are numbers that tell you where the workflow actually rubs against itself. That's friction. And friction doesn't show up in a maturity scoreboard. It shows up in queue depth, ticket age, exception rates, and how many times a piece of work changes hands before it's done.