Process Automation: Why the Biggest Hurdle Has Nothing to Do with Code

Process automation sounds like a technical subject, but those who work with it quickly encounter a different dimension: people, habits, and years of accumulated knowledge that exists nowhere in writing. Daria Kovalchuk, Project Manager at Specific-Group, knows this tension from her daily work. For nearly five years, she has moved between business units and development teams and knows exactly where automation initiatives really break down. In the latest episode of SPG Voices, she speaks openly about what this work demands every day, and what makes it possible.

In the episode, Daria reflects on the moment automation projects start to slip and why the first technical go-live is far from the finish line:

„The first technical go-live is just a milestone in the project. Real success is when the new application becomes a normal way of working.“

Daria Kovalchuk, Project Manager, Specific-Group

Why does process automation so often fail at adoption rather than technology?

Many projects set out to replace manual steps and fail because they are really asking people to change habits. Someone who has relied on a spreadsheet for years experiences a new system as additional effort at first: more fields, earlier data entry, unfamiliar structures. The benefit sits on the organization’s side, the cost falls on the individual. This asymmetry explains why user adoption is so hard to win. A second, often underestimated challenge compounds this: legacy systems are routinely dismissed as technical debt. In reality, they are containers of business logic and institutional knowledge built up over years, distributed across code, memory, and informal agreements. Ignore that and you end up rebuilding the same complexity just in a newer language.

How is AI changing the reality of process automation?

Daria Kovalchuk sees AI tools like Ozgar as valuable support during the discovery phase: they help document existing code, generate diagrams, and establish a clear picture of the current state faster than ever before. What they cannot do is surface the tacit knowledge held in the minds of subject matter experts. That still requires workshops, conversations, and people who can interpret what they find. For Daria, this is not a contradiction, it is the core of her work and the reason she looks at the future of process automation with confidence. How she puts this into practice, and why she swears by the „rip the plaster“ approach when rolling out new tools, is what this episode of SPG Voices is all about.