Yes, I recently planned out how to transition a company to a continuous delivery release model, and this was part of the plan.

One thing I insisted on was on building and running playbooks, rather than jumping to full automation from merge to production. This phase was temporary: it might only take a few weeks or months before people will get bored with this and find it tedious. When _boredom_ is the biggest problem you have with a process, then it's time to automate.

But in the meantime, going through these motions manually has educational value, and lets you refine your processes easily.

Automating a process tends to ossify it, and concentrate knowledge about it in whoever creates and maintains the automation. Playbooks distribute knowledge to whoever executes them, and make systems amenable to change.