Before you start
- A working manual process
- One test project
Automate a process you can explain
Write the manual rule first: trigger, required facts, branches, actions, wait, success condition, fallback, owner, and stop condition. If the team cannot explain the rule, automation will make the confusion faster.
Use preview before activation. Confirm the exact recipients, content, project, provider/cost owner, and objects that may change. Keep sensitive or metered actions behind the workspace approval policy.
Warm inquiry response
Trigger: a public lead form creates a project.
Conditions: marketing consent is not required for this operational reply; a usable email or
portal recipient exists.
Actions: send a warm acknowledgement, tag the inquiry source, assign the project, and create a
response task.
Stop: the client replies, books, or the project is closed.
The acknowledgement should describe when a person will respond. Do not promise an SLA the team cannot meet.
Stage transition checklist
Trigger: project enters a selected stage.
Conditions: the required milestone, contract, payment, or form state matches the process.
Actions: create idempotent tasks, assign the correct member, and send a portal request only
when the recipient needs to act.
Fallback: create one visible owner task when a dependency or connection is missing.
Use a compound condition rather than encoding client type, year, or service in duplicated pipelines.
Viewed but incomplete follow-up
Trigger: a specific person is sent a specific message, form, document, request, or invoice.
Wait: the exact recipient performs the chosen meaningful action before the deadline.
Branch: if completed, suppress the reminder; if viewed but incomplete, send helpful context; if
not viewed, verify delivery before reminding.
An email open is low-confidence and never proves that a person read or understood the content. Client and vendor activity may drive workspace automations; workspace member observation is never shown back to them.
Appointment preparation
Trigger: a booking is confirmed.
Actions: create preparation tasks relative to the appointment, send the right questionnaire,
and notify the assigned host.
Recovery: if a tenant-authorized Meet or Teams link is missing, create an owner task and keep
the booking confirmed while link repair remains visible.
Vendor coordination
Trigger: a vendor is invited or a shared milestone changes.
Conditions: the project and exact vendor have the required collaboration grant.
Actions: create a vendor request, publish only the selected task/file/milestone, and notify the
vendor through the tenant-selected sender.
Stop: the vendor responds or the share is revoked.
Never broaden a project share because a vendor also owns a Cygnetree workspace.
Test cost and failure behavior
For every recipe:
- Run preview against a test project.
- Confirm merge-field fallbacks and formatting.
- Force a missing recipient, stale stage, provider rejection, timeout, and duplicate event.
- Inspect retry, dead-letter, cancellation, and replay behavior.
- Verify basic steps remain included and any AI/compute/provider consumption shows its source and allowance before execution.