Do Not Give Imperfect People Perfect Systems
As engineers and optimists, we build perfect systems. These systems make sense when we think about machines that, in general, are good at doing things perfectly every single time.
However, we often apply those same system to people when we think of project management, operations, engineering processes, etc.
Take an example of asking someone to fill out an approval form in an IT ticket system like ServiceNow. We ask them to fill the form out with the right people, submit it at the right time, and to follow a system written down to the tee.
Too often these fail and we shake our heads at why people cannot do anything right. Of course people cannot do things right, we're animals. We're excellent at adapting, not at repeatable consistent results.
The solution is to combine the efforts of people and machine.
Take this overly simple example, you have a machine that checks an inbox everyday at 8:50 AM and takes the email from the inbox, grabs an attachment, prints it, and has it mailed. The one day the inbox doesn't receive an email at 8:50 AM it will fail. If we could interject a human to be responsible for feeding the machine the attachment, it adds a lot more flexibility. The email can come in late, the attachment could come on a thumb drive, etc. it doesn't matter.
Do not build perfect systems for imperfect people. Build perfect systems for perfect* machines and supplement with imperfect people.
*I am aware machines are not always perfect - drive failures, corruption, etc. But, for our purposes they are far more perfect in their ability to execute a specific task than a person.