Automation sprawl happens quietly. Things tend to build up if you don’t regularly do a workflow automation review. Scripts and scheduled tasks can become outdated or silently fail without anyone noticing. This leads to duplicated efforts, inconsistent outcomes, and wasted engineering hours.
Conducting a workflow automation review every quarter can help prevent this. It gives different teams in your organization visibility and control. It also provides the management and IT team with the opportunity to see current automation practices and align them with the overall organization’s goals and requirements.
Guide to fixing automation sprawl
There are several things you can do to fix an automation sprawl. First, you must conduct an automation review to see the value and use of each workflow automation. To perform this review, you must create standardized criteria to apply to each automation.
Once done with the review, classify each automation into actionable tiers that will dictate what you will do with them. Eliminate any redundancies and retire automations that you no longer use. You should also ensure documentation on these workflows are kept up-to-date to help new employees onboarding.
Conduct an automation inventory and usage audit
First, you have to catalog all automation workflows across all your systems. Here are a few examples of things you need to catalog:
- Different scheduled scripts deployed to your managed devices using an RMM, PowerShell, or task scheduler
- PSA-triggered workflows
- Endpoint-level scheduled actions
- Conditional or policy-based remediations
For each item in your log, include the following information:
- Owner
- Last execution date
- Frequency
- Success/failure rate
- Dependencies or linked conditions
Evaluate using standardized criteria
| Criteria | Questions to ask |
| Relevance | Is the automation workflow still needed, or has it become unnecessary? |
| Performance | Does the automated workflow work consistently and correctly? If not, what modifications are needed? |
| Redundancy | Does the automated workflow overlap with another? Is there a way to remove this redundancy? |
| Control | Does the automated workflow still align with the organization’s current procedures, standards, and overall goals? |
Classify into actionable tiers
Once you’ve reviewed the different automation workflows, you must figure out your next step. Create different actionable tiers that can be done in response to the review.
Here are some tiers you can use:
- Retire
- The automation is obsolete and/or redundant and is safe to delete with little negative impact on automation workflows.
- Refactor
- There are a few issues with the automation that you need to resolve.
- The scripts and workflows need to be modified and/or consolidated.
- Continue
- The automation is still reliable, useful, and delivering value.
- No actions are needed.
These tiers make things clearer and provide employees with clear steps on how to proceed after the review.
Eliminate redundancy and consolidate similar workflows
It’s important to identify:
- Which scripts have overlapping logic and/or goals
- Separate workflows performing similar remediations
- Endpoint-level and centralized actions that do the same thing
Consolidate your findings into modular, shared components to reduce the work done on maintenance.
Ensure documentation and ownership are up to date
When doing your review, ensure that every automated workflow has the following:
- A clearly assigned owner or maintainer
- A purpose statement or internal description
- Notes on where it runs and what dependencies exist
- Tags or grouping metadata for future sorting or export
Having those makes it easier to onboard new members, run audits, and perform a faster triifcase an issue occurs.
Reinforce wins and maintain high-value automations
It’s important to highlight which automations still provide value and work well for your organization.
Highlight workflows that:
- Prevent alerts and problems from occurring
- Resolve issues without ticket creation
- Save manual time in user onboarding or patch cleanup
- Improve SLA attainment or reporting accuracy
Document the value they provide and talk about them during QBRs to show your clients their ongoing ROIs.
What is a workflow review?
Each organization has many workflow automations in place. They make things more efficient and eliminate the chance of human error. Over time, these automations can accumulate as different teams and employees create them to help them finish their tasks. Because of this, you may end up with too many automations that perform redundant and obsolete tasks.
To fix the automation sprawl, you need to do a workflow review. There, you’ll review all the automations each team has in place, analyze their value to the organization, and see if they are still needed. From that review, you can determine what needs to be retired, optimized, and retained to further help achieve your organization’s goals.
NinjaOne integration ideas for a workflow automation tools review
The NinjaOne RMM tool can support many automations for your organization. It also offers flexible tools to support quarterly automation reviews.
Here are just a few tools that will assist you in your goals:
- Automation Task Logs
- Export data on execution history by task or run a script to view failures, usage frequency, and aging workflows.
- Script Library Management
- Review all scripts by category, tag, owner, or other relevant information.
- Get rid of unused ones or group similar scripts for consolidation.
- Policy-Attached Workflows
- Identify automations tied to monitoring or alert policies.
- Confirm that triggers are still valid and not redundant.
- Scheduled Task Filtering
- Filter scheduled automations by last run or status to catch inactive tasks or high-failure sequences.
- See if there are redundancies or tasks that are no longer needed.
- Reporting + QBR Templates
- Include automation stats in QBRs to demonstrate ongoing effort and cleanup — e.g., “8 legacy scripts retired this quarter.”
Reduce automation sprawl by conducting a quarterly workflow review
Despite its conveniences, automation isn’t something you just “set and forget.” You need to regularly review everything to ensure that all automations in use remain valuable, well-documented, and aligned with your team’s constantly evolving workflow processes.
For your review, you must create an inventory of all your automations, evaluate them using a standardized rubric, and sort them in a tiered list according to what you want to do with them.
Get rid of redundant automations and ensure that the workflows you’re keeping are well-documented. Doing this will also protect your uptime and ensure efficient use of your automation engineer’s time.
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