Automation Lab
AI + n8n recipes for delivery automation.
Practical workflows that combine AI summarisation with n8n orchestration. Each recipe solves a real delivery problem — no toy demos.
Recipes
Each recipe includes the tools, steps, and estimated setup time. All use free tiers where possible.
Automated Standup Insights
Summarise Jira movement, stale issues, blockers, and ownership gaps before daily standup. Delivered to Slack or Teams at 9am.
- 1Pull yesterday's Jira transitions via REST API
- 2Identify stale items (no movement > 3 days)
- 3Summarise blockers and ownership gaps with LLM
- 4Post structured summary to team channel
Dependency Risk Alerts
Flag cross-team dependencies that are late, ownerless, or approaching critical milestone dates. Weekly digest or real-time alert.
- 1Query all linked issues across projects with 'blocks' relationship
- 2Check due dates against sprint boundaries
- 3Score risk based on age, status, and owner assignment
- 4Send prioritised alert to delivery lead channel
Sprint Health Automation
Combine scope movement, blocked time, carryover, and confidence into a practical sprint health signal. Published mid-sprint and at close.
- 1Calculate scope change (stories added/removed after planning)
- 2Measure blocked time and carryover ratio
- 3Compare velocity against 3-sprint average
- 4Generate health narrative and publish to wiki
Delivery Metrics Intelligence
Generate weekly delivery narratives from Jira data, risks, decisions, and team health inputs. Ready for steering committee or stakeholder email.
- 1Aggregate throughput, cycle time, WIP across teams
- 2Pull top risks and recent decisions from RAID register
- 3Generate executive summary with LLM (trend + recommendation)
- 4Format and deliver via email or publish to Confluence
Retrospective Action Tracker
Automatically collect retro actions, assign owners, set due dates, and send reminders. No more actions lost in Miro boards.
- 1Trigger on retro session end (form submission or Miro webhook)
- 2Parse actions, owners, and due dates from structured input
- 3Create Jira issues in team improvement backlog
- 4Send weekly reminder for overdue actions
Release Readiness Checker
Before each release, automatically verify all stories are Done, no blockers remain, test coverage thresholds met, and change approvals are in place.
- 1Check all stories in fix version are in Done status
- 2Verify no open blockers linked to release items
- 3Query GitHub for PR merge status and test results
- 4Post go/no-go checklist to release channel
Automation principles
Automate the boring, not the thinking
Use AI for data gathering and summarisation. Keep humans in the loop for decisions and judgement.
Start with one workflow
Pick the highest-friction manual task (usually reporting) and automate it first. Expand from there.
Keep it auditable
Every automated output should show its sources. If a stakeholder asks 'where did this come from?', the answer should be clear.
Fail gracefully
If the Jira API is down or the LLM returns garbage, the workflow should notify you — not silently send bad data.
Why n8n?
n8n is an open-source workflow automation tool with a visual editor. It connects to Jira, Slack, Google Sheets, LLM APIs, and 400+ integrations out of the box. Self-host for free or use their cloud tier. It's the most practical tool for delivery automation without writing custom code.
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