Turn a manual checklist into a reliable automation

Here's a checklist my team runs manually: {{paste checklist}}. It runs {{frequency}}, takes {{time}}, and mistakes cause {{consequence}}.

1. For each item, classify: fully automatable, automatable-with-judgement, or human-only. Justify the human-only ones — be strict.
2. Identify the items where automation would remove a useful moment of human noticing. Say what we'd stop seeing.
3. Design the automation for the first group: trigger, steps, tools, and data sources.
4. For the judgement items, design the assist: the automation gathers and presents, a human decides in one click. Specify exactly what's presented.
5. Specify verification — how the automation proves it did the thing, not just that it ran without error. This is the difference between an automation and a silent failure.
6. Define the audit trail: what's logged, where, and how I'd reconstruct what happened three weeks later.
7. Rollout: what to run in shadow mode alongside the manual process first, and the criteria to switch over.

Don't automate step 1 of 12 and leave the rest manual — that's usually worse than either.