The spreadsheet is the automation backlog

If you want to find automation opportunities, do not ask for them. Ask which spreadsheets people keep.

If you want to find automation opportunities in an organisation, do not send out a request for suggestions. You will get a list of complaints, weighted heavily towards whoever is most comfortable complaining.

Ask instead which spreadsheets people maintain that no system produces.

Every one of those files exists because a system did not do something someone needed. Somebody filled the gap manually, and then kept filling it, often for years, usually without telling anyone it had become load-bearing.

These files are the honest backlog. They are not a wish list; they are evidence of a requirement real enough that a person absorbed the cost of meeting it themselves. And they tend to be well understood by whoever maintains them, which makes them unusually easy to specify.

There is a caution attached. The right answer is often not to automate the spreadsheet. It is to ask why the system does not do this, and whether the underlying process should be producing this need at all. Automating the file preserves the gap and makes it permanent.

The conversation is easy to start, too. Ask someone what they would lose if that file disappeared tomorrow, and you will get a precise, unguarded answer about what the process actually needs — usually faster and more honestly than any requirements workshop would produce.

But as a place to start looking, the shared drive tells you more than any workshop will.