nurvexAutomation projects rarely fail loudly. They fail quietly, over weeks, while everyone involved insists it's "almost done." After watching a few dozen of these up close, the warning signs turn out to be depressingly consistent.
The scope keeps absorbing exceptions
Every automation starts with a clean happy path. The first sign of trouble is when "just handle this one exception too" becomes a weekly request. If the exception list is growing faster than the core logic, the project has quietly become a rules engine nobody scoped for.
Nobody owns what happens when it's wrong
Ask who gets paged when the automation makes a bad call. If the honest answer is "nobody, we'll notice eventually," that's the real risk — not the automation itself.
The fix is almost always organizational, not technical: name an owner, define what "wrong" looks like, and build the fallback path before launch, not after the first incident.
Projects that survive this stage tend to share one habit — they treat the automation as a junior employee that needs review, not a fire-and-forget script.