Step 0. Explain the process, end-to-end, in plain written English. It's amazing how many people jump directly from "oh here's a problem" to "let's automate it"

Step 0. Explain the process, end-to-end, in plain written English. It's amazing how many people jump directly from "oh here's a problem" to "let's automate it" without a suitable definition of the problem. A runbook as you've described it above, is a perfect intermediate step. You can refine the process, add error handling and special cases, tune it based on empirical data, and adjust the process on the fly until it's boring. Then you can automate it :-)