When a business decides to transform, the instinct is to target the big systems. Replace the platform. Overhaul the tool. Migrate the warehouse. These initiatives consume years and budgets, and the impact lands — if it lands at all — long after the original sponsor has moved on.
That’s where the wrong question gets asked.
The biggest aggregate value isn’t in the big systems. It’s in the thousands of small processes that live outside them — the email chains, the spreadsheets emailed between teams, the manual cross-references someone does every Tuesday, the report compiled by hand because nobody’s automated it. Each one is small. Together, they’re where most of an organisation’s friction actually lives.
The same person who watches the big-system transformation drag on for years can transform twenty small processes in a quarter. The aggregate impact is enormous. The cost is small. The risk is low — each one is bounded, reversible, and built where the work actually happens.
So why don’t organisations do this?
Three reasons. The big systems are visible — they show up on strategy decks and in CIO dashboards. The small processes aren’t. The big systems have budgets — the small ones don’t, because they live outside the project portfolio. And the big systems feel safe — a board can understand a platform replacement; nobody can articulate “we’re transforming twenty workflows we hadn’t catalogued.”
Run the small-process transformation in parallel. That’s where employees feel the friction every day, and that’s where AI now makes the build trivially fast.
Aim lower. Ship sooner. Compound across hundreds of small wins. The big system will still be there when you’re done.