Automate Your TPS Reports

I asked our technology division for a server. Then the emails started.

Registration steps. Security reviews. Ticket workflow, status notices, more forms to fill out, different groups to sign up with. All of it thick and technical, each message designed differently, each one burying the thing it actually needed from me. I didn't have time to read and sort through all of it. I've got people on my team I could hand it to, but I hate giving tedious work like that to the enterprise-grade specialists I'm blessed to work with.

Big companies are full of risks to mitigate. Security, privacy, intellectual property leaks, costs, resource utilization, scalability, hundreds more. What do we put in place to address them? Process and bureaucracy. Forms, front doors, approval workflows, business justifications, tickets, governance structures, portals to click through, documentation to read, automated emails to answer. Most of it rough around the edges.

Rough because none of it makes anyone money. It sits several steps back from finding common ground with our customers, helping them, and getting something in return for our shareholders. It comes across as cost. Its value shows up as the bad outcomes that never happen, and the probability and severity of those are hard to measure. So the investment stays modest, and we all click through outdated, unintuitive paperwork and call it the cost of doing business.

I've stopped letting that slow me down. Focused help from an LLM, the chat assistant most of us have open all day now, plus a couple of AI-fluent people on my team, gets me through most of it.

The server was for everything my team had built with AI over a short stretch of time. An AI-centric knowledge base covering business, managerial and organizational use cases, and a set of tools around it, all of them working. It was running on my laptop, which is fine for one person and reaches no one else. We needed somewhere to put it so my team and my stakeholders could get at it. Where I work, if you've got a good reason and you need a server, you can get one.

But it isn't easy, and it shouldn't be. Every one of those emails was somebody doing their job. Standing up a serious piece of hardware for serious reasons means registering it, locking it down, and knowing who answers for it when something goes wrong. Even employee-only and inside the firewall, a server opens up risks somebody has to cover, and all of that sits outside my accountability. I'll get it by the grace and wisdom of our technology division. Their problems are my problems, so whatever they need to do this cleanly, I'm in. None of that makes the paperwork fun.

So I found the front door, started the process, got the wave of email, and then put my LLM on my inbox. I asked it three things.

Recently I requested a new internal server instance so I can start to migrate some of the work we're doing here. I filled out a request form (internal URL) and it seemed to go well. Now there are a bunch of emails in my inbox with follow up steps, and it's too much for me to parse right now.

Please review all of those emails that mention (X, Y and Z), take a thorough look at them, and output an overview of what we're trying to do here, why, what work has already happened, and what needs to be done moving forward. Store it as a PDF on my Desktop.

When you're done with that, draft an email to (senior technical solutions person on my team) and attach the PDF. Then forward her all the original emails associated with this, and archive them.

And that's what it did.

None of that paperwork is going away, and I'm not looking to get around it. I want us to fill out every form perfectly. Fully compliant with our obligations, thorough, done to a standard. A server like that is a gift, and doing our part properly is how we get to keep it.

So now I read all of it and understand what we owe, instead of skimming for the next box to check. The time that gives back goes into better answers. It takes less of my week and the work is better.

Simplifying the process itself would be better still. That one isn't mine to fix. Getting what I need out of it is easy now, and I'll take it.