The Cost of the Workaround Nobody Talks About
Every business has them. The spreadsheet that sits between two systems that do not talk to each other. The email folder that is really a queue. The step where somebody re-types data from one screen into another because an import was never set up. The report that takes four hours on the last Friday of the month.
Nobody planned these. They appeared because something was urgent, the proper fix was not available, and a person solved the problem in front of them. That was the right call at the time. The trouble is what happens next, which is nothing.
Workarounds are invisible by design
A workaround exists precisely because it stops the problem being visible. The work still gets done, the customer still gets served, so from the outside everything looks fine.
That is why they rarely appear in a project plan or a budget. Nobody is complaining. The cost is absorbed by individuals, quietly, in hours that never get counted.
Which means the only way to find them is to go and look.
What they actually cost
The obvious cost is time, and it is usually underestimated because it is spread thinly. Twenty minutes a day for one person is roughly two working weeks a year.
The less obvious costs are larger.
- Errors. Every manual re-entry is a chance to transpose a number. Some of those are found late, by a customer.
- Key person dependency. Workarounds are almost never documented, so they live in one head. That person cannot easily be off, promoted or replaced.
- Blocked improvement. You cannot automate or improve a process nobody has described, and the workaround is often the part that matters most.
- Bad data. When the authoritative version lives in someone's spreadsheet, every report built on the system is quietly wrong.
- Risk. Data copied into personal files, shared logins created to make a step possible, approvals that happen by message. Most access problems start as a convenience.
A workaround is a loan. You borrowed time when you needed it, and you have been paying interest ever since without noticing.
How to find them
People do not volunteer workarounds, because to them it is just how the job is done. Asking what workarounds do you have produces blank looks.
Better questions get better answers. What is the most annoying part of your week. What do you do that you are fairly sure a computer should be doing. If you were off for two weeks, what would somebody need you to explain. Where do you keep information that is not in the system.
Or just sit with someone for an hour while they work. The moment you see a spreadsheet open next to the main system, you have found one.
Sort them before you fix them
Not every workaround deserves a project. Some are cheap, stable and fine, and replacing them costs more than they cost you.
Score each one roughly on two axes. How much time and risk it carries, and how hard it would be to remove. That gives you four groups, and the useful one is the top left. High cost, low effort to fix. That group is usually where an afternoon of configuration removes an hour a week forever.
The high cost, hard to fix group is your business case for something larger. Write it down with numbers, because that is the conversation that eventually funds a proper fix.
Fix the cause, not the symptom
Before you build anything, ask why the workaround exists. The answer is usually one of a small number of things. Two systems that do not talk. A permission somebody does not have. A process step that was never designed. A rule that made sense once and is now just inherited.
Some of those are solved by configuration, some by a conversation, and a surprising number by simply deleting a step nobody needed.
The wrong fix is to automate the workaround itself, which locks in the original problem and makes it harder to see.
Document the ones you keep
Some workarounds will stay, because the real fix is expensive or scheduled for later. Those should be documented like any other process, with steps, an owner, and a note explaining why it exists and what would remove it.
That note is worth more than it looks. In two years, somebody will ask why this spreadsheet exists, and the honest answer should not have to be that nobody remembers.
Make the trade visible next time
Workarounds will keep appearing, because urgent things will keep happening. The habit worth building is small. When somebody invents one, it gets written down in one line, with a date and an owner, on a list that is reviewed once a quarter.
That single change turns an invisible cost into a managed one, and it is the difference between a business that improves and one that just gets more complicated.
Finding these and working out which ones are worth removing is a large part of what we do with clients. It is rarely the exciting part of a project. It is usually where the fastest return is.
If you suspect there are a few of these hiding in your week, they are usually quick to find. Book a consultation, or visit www.expertechsolution.com.
