When doing Agile development identifying and eliminating waste is a important practice. There is many things to eliminate, but one of the usual remedies is to automate a manual and error prone task. In my experience it is worth spending a lot of time automating tasks, not just because it saves time but because it gives you predictability.
Taking automation and predictability all the way would probably lead you to something like Continious Production that Paul Duvall has a post on. Johannes Brodwall also has some good perspectives on something similar.
It is sort of the holy grail of agile development, and would be something like what Jeff Sutherland said the are doing at Patientkeeper. They have deploy at the push of a button that enables them to deploy new versions to all their customers on a regular basis.
Spend time automating people. 🙂