Workflow discovery: understand how work really happens

Follow a real piece of work

Start with someone who does the job. Ask them to walk through a recent request, including the emails, spreadsheets, and systems they used. Notice where they wait, repeat information, or rely on someone else.

• Trigger: what starts the work?
• Responsibility: who acts, and what information do they need?
• Handoff: what gets passed to the next person or system?
• Outcome: what must happen for the work to be complete?

Record how things work today before deciding what the application should change. An awkward manual step may be worth removing; a policy check may need to stay.

Look for the rules that change the route

The usual sequence is only part of the workflow. Ask what happens when information is missing, the responsible person is unavailable, or a request needs correcting.

For this fictional leave process, the team agrees on three rules:

• Managers review employees’ requests.
• HR reviews managers’ own requests and covers absent managers.
• Nobody approves their own leave.

Try changing the requester or the manager’s availability below. The request stays the same; the rule changes who receives it.

Follow every path to its outcome

Approval, rejection, and a request for changes do not all end the same way. Check what is recorded, who gets notified, and whether the work must return to an earlier step.

Walk through the draft with the people responsible for the process. Look for:

• Steps with no clear owner or missing information.
• Exceptions that lead nowhere.
• Assumptions that still need someone’s decision.

For leave requests, an approval or rejection needs a recorded decision and a notification. A request for changes needs a route back to the requester. Those differences matter when you start defining features.

How AlphaTales helps discover the workflows

AlphaTales uses the project foundation, clarification answers, and completed research to prepare candidate application workflows. Your team checks them against how the business works and what the application should support.

• Choose the workflows: review each purpose, main actor, trigger, and intended outcome, then decide what belongs in scope.
• Develop the detail: generate steps for selected flows and review the roles, prerequisites, decisions, and branches.
• Fill the gaps: refine the draft or add a missing workflow with its name, trigger, and outcome, then generate its detail.

The generated workflow is a draft for business review. Your team confirms that its rules and outcomes are correct.

Use the agreed workflow to plan the features

A reviewed process gives each feature a purpose. The leave form captures the request, the approval queue routes it, and the decision history records the result.

AlphaTales checks that required workflows have detailed steps before confirmation. Once confirmed, they become context for feature planning. The full planning journey explains how that work continues into requirements and developer handoff.