Summer cover: who watches the automation while everyone is away
Your automated process does not take holidays. The person who checks its output does. Four things to settle before the office empties.
In December this blog suggested an access review before the Christmas break. The summer version is more important, because Swiss holidays are longer, staggered, and the person covering usually has no idea what the automation does.
The specific summer failure
It is not that something breaks. It is that something drifts, and the person who would have noticed is in Ticino for three weeks.
A supplier changes their invoice layout in week one. The extraction quietly starts putting the wrong field into the wrong place. The holiday cover approves it, because they do not know what it normally looks like. By week four there are sixty bookings to unpick.
The four things to settle
- Who is covering, by name, for what. Not « the office ». One name per automated process, told explicitly that this is part of the cover.
- What normal looks like. Show the cover three good examples of the output before you leave. Five minutes. This is the single highest-value thing in this list, because it is the only way an unfamiliar person can recognise abnormal.
- The threshold for stopping. Give them permission to switch it off and do it by hand. Explicitly. A temporary cover will never take that decision unless they have been told they may, and the cost of a week of manual processing is far lower than sixty wrong bookings.
- Who to reach, and how. One number that is answered. If the honest answer is that nobody is reachable in week three, then the process should pause for that week rather than run unwatched.
The option most companies overlook
Turning it off for the quiet weeks is a legitimate choice, not a defeat.
Volume is usually lower in July and August anyway. If your automation saves nine hours a month and the risk of unsupervised drift is sixty bookings, pausing it for three weeks costs about six hours and removes the risk entirely.
And the thing that does not pause
The payment verification rule. Holiday periods are peak season for exactly the impersonation attacks covered in December, precisely because the usual approver is away and the cover does not know what is normal.
Say it once more before people leave: no payment or bank-detail change on voice, video or email alone, whoever appears to be asking, including from a beach.