I've always believed this and had the most success when having done it, but I've also worked on a lot of projects where -- when I said I wanted at least three w

I've always believed this and had the most success when having done it, but I've also worked on a lot of projects where -- when I said I wanted at least three weeks to meet with people, do interviews, observe the task to be automated and perform it myself -- I was told the project was too important to waste time on such things. As you can predict, those projects were so important, they ended up being killed because they were taking so long and didn't sufficiently automate the task they were meant to (even if they followed the requirements--to the letter).