How to Create a Workflow
for a Specific Task

Creating workflows can be intimidating, especially when you need to automate a complex business process that has many moving parts. So the best course of action is to start small and build out your workflows over time. In this post, we’ll explore how to create a workflow for a specific task in Pneumatic.

Start Small

As the saying goes, eat the elephant one piece at a time. You don’t want to start by creating super complex workflows made up of dozens of steps. The best feature of Pneumatic is that it allows you to easily edit and update workflow templates, even when there are already running workflows based on the templates in the system. This means that you can start small and simple, and add steps, performers, workflow variables, and conditions as you use the template and realize what you need through practice.

Create a One-Step Workflow

You can start by creating a workflow made up of just one step. This can help your team migrate from task management with minimal drama. Pneumatic actually offers a one-off task template out of the box. Once you’ve gotten acclimatized to launching multiple workflows in Pneumatic, you can look back at your company’s operations to see how individual tasks your team deals with on a daily basis can be organized into workflows.

Add Checklists and Multiple Performers

Again, don’t rush things, you can start by adding checklists and multiple performers to your one-off task workflows. These will allow you to break down your task into steps, but at the same time, retain flexibility in terms of the order the steps need to be completed in. Once a natural order emerges for which items on your checklist get completed first and which get completed later, you can evolve your one-off task workflow with a checklist into a workflow comprising several sequential tasks. Some of those sequential tasks can still feature checklists so work on some items can be completed in parallel.

Add Conditions and Integrations

As you see more patterns in how your team is actually using the workflow templates, you may want to add conditions to skip some steps depending on inputs received from previous steps. Finally, as the last step of your workflow evolution, you may add integrations with other apps. Pneumatic supports Zapier and Make integrations and features a free public API that can be utilized to build integration with literally anything.

Conclusion

So the golden rule is to start small and evolve your workflows naturally over time by adding steps, performers, conditions and integrations. Pneumatic’s key feature is the flexibility in how you can always go back and change your workflow templates and how Pneumatic will then go and update all the running workflows for you. Thus, instead of trying to anticipate every eventuality, you can instead build out your workflows incrementally over time to achieve a near-perfect match for the requirements of your organization.