Map the Flow, Not the Org Chart
Start by following one unit of work end to end: a single invoice, one support ticket, one onboarding. Trace it from the moment it enters your world to the moment it is truly done, naming every hand it passes through and every wait in between. Do not interview the manager first; interview the person who actually does the step. You will find work that the official process never mentions, like the analyst who quietly re-formats a spreadsheet every Monday because the downstream system chokes otherwise. That re-formatting is real work and it is invisible. Write down each step as a verb plus an object: receive request, check eligibility, copy data, wait for approval. Mark every handoff and every queue, because handoffs and queues are where time disappears. By the end you should have a flow you can read aloud to the person who does the job, and they should say yes, that is exactly it. If they correct you, you have learned where the documented process and the lived process diverge, and that gap is usually where your best opportunities and your worst risks both live.
Find the Bottleneck That Actually Hurts
Not every slow step is a bottleneck. A bottleneck is the constraint that sets the pace of the whole flow; speeding up anything else just piles work in front of it. Look for the step where work waits the longest, where the queue is deepest, or where one specific person is always the blocker. Measure two things per step: touch time, the minutes a human is actively working, and wait time, the hours or days the work sits idle. In most office workflows, wait time dwarfs touch time, so a tool that shaves three minutes off a five-minute task while ignoring a two-day approval queue is theater. Ask where rework comes from too, because a step that produces errors forces loops that look like volume but are really waste. Rank your candidates by how much faster the whole flow would move if that one step disappeared. That ranking, not your enthusiasm for a particular tool, decides where AI earns its place. Solve the constraint or you have solved nothing.