There’s probably a spreadsheet somewhere in your organization doing a job it was never meant to do.
Maybe it tracks project status because the official system doesn’t show the information the team actually needs. Maybe someone exports data every Friday, cleans it up, and manually builds a report for leadership. Maybe a shared document has quietly become the real source of truth while the system everyone is supposed to use gets updated only when someone remembers.
These are often called workarounds, and it’s easy to treat them as bad habits.
But most workarounds don’t start because people are careless or resistant to process. They start because smart, capable people are trying to get their work done.
The workaround solves a problem.
The question is whether anyone is paying attention to what that problem is telling you.
When the Official Process Doesn’t Match the Real One
Most organizations have an official version of how work happens.
A request comes in. Information gets entered into a system. Someone reviews it. Work moves through a defined process. Data gets captured along the way. Reports come out the other end.
Then there’s how the work actually happens.
Someone sends an email because the request form doesn’t capture enough information. A project manager creates a spreadsheet because the system can’t organize the data the way the team needs to see it. Someone copies information between applications because the systems don’t talk to each other. A manager asks for a separate report because they can’t easily get the answers they need from the existing dashboard.
Each individual decision makes sense.
Over time, though, those decisions can create an entirely different operating system underneath the official one.
This is something we notice frequently in consulting work. A team may come to us asking about a tool, a reporting problem, or a process that feels cumbersome. But once you look closely at how the work actually moves through the organization, the issue is rarely just one tool or one process.
There are usually small adaptations everywhere.
And those adaptations tell you a lot.
The Spreadsheet Isn’t the Problem
Spreadsheets are often the most visible sign of a workaround because they’re flexible, familiar, and fast.
Need to track something the system doesn’t? Create a spreadsheet.
Need to combine information from three different places? Create a spreadsheet.
Need to give leadership a report by tomorrow morning? You know where this is going.
And sometimes a spreadsheet really is the right tool.
The problem is when it becomes the bridge between disconnected processes without anyone intentionally deciding that it should be.
Now someone has to maintain it. Information may exist in multiple places. Updates depend on people remembering to make them. Reporting requires manual reconciliation. And the person who built the spreadsheet may become the only person who fully understands how the whole thing works.
What started as a clever solution to a small problem has become part of the organization’s infrastructure.
Shadow Systems Grow for a Reason
The same thing happens beyond spreadsheets.
Teams create their own trackers, databases, forms, shared folders, reporting processes, and communication channels because something about the existing environment isn’t working for them.
Collectively, these can become shadow systems: processes and tools that exist alongside the organization’s official systems.
It can be tempting to respond by telling people to stop using them.
That may remove workarounds, but it doesn’t necessarily remove the reason they existed.
If employees have to enter the same information in three places, they’ll eventually find a shortcut. If a system takes ten clicks to accomplish something they do 30 times a day, they’ll look for another way. If leadership needs information the official reporting process can’t provide, someone will build a report outside of it.
People naturally optimize the work in front of them.
That’s useful information.
In fact, some of the most productive consulting conversations start there. Not with “What software should we replace?” but with “Show us how this actually works today.”
Where does the information start? Where does it get duplicated? What happens outside the official system? What does someone have to remember to do manually? Where does the process slow down?
Those questions get closer to the real goal: helping people do their work smarter, faster, and better.
Manual Reporting Is Often a Symptom
Reporting is one of the easiest places to see the effects of disconnected processes.
Imagine a weekly status report that requires someone to export data from one system, pull information from another, ask three people for updates, reconcile the results in Excel, and then copy the final numbers into PowerPoint.
The organization has a report.
What it doesn’t necessarily have is a reporting system.
The distinction matters.
Manual reporting can hide problems with data quality, system integration, process design, ownership, or even the metrics themselves. Improving how data is collected and reported can reduce some of that manual effort while giving teams a more reliable view of what’s actually happening.
Because a capable person is filling in the gaps every week, the underlying problem can remain invisible.
The report gets delivered, so from the outside, the process appears to work.
But the effort required to make it work tells a different story.
Look for the Friction Before You Remove the Workarounds
None of this means all workarounds need a major technology project.
Sometimes the spreadsheet is fine. Sometimes the process only needs a small adjustment. Sometimes employees simply need better training on capabilities that already exist.
But before eliminating workarounds, understand why it was created and where friction is hiding in the way work gets done.
Ask questions like:
- What does this let the team do that the official process doesn’t?
- What information are people struggling to find or share?
- Where is information being entered more than once?
- What work depends on copying, exporting, reformatting, or manually reconciling data?
- Which processes depend heavily on one person’s knowledge?
- Where have employees created their own tools to make an existing system usable?
Those answers can point to something much more useful than “people aren’t following the process.”
They show you where the process and the work have stopped lining up.
And that is really the heart of process improvement. The goal isn’t necessarily to make everyone conform more closely to the system. It’s to make sure the systems, tools, and processes actually support the work people are trying to do.
Your Workarounds Are Giving You a Map
Organizations often look for inefficiency by examining the systems and processes they’ve intentionally built.
It can be just as valuable to look at what employees have built around them.
Workarounds like spreadsheets, shadow systems, disconnected processes, and manual reports scattered throughout an organization aren’t automatically signs of poor discipline. Often, they’re evidence of people adapting to friction.
For consultants like us, that makes them interesting.
They show us where people are spending extra effort, where information isn’t flowing, where systems aren’t matching reality, and where a team has already identified a problem well enough to invent its own solution.
And that’s why simply eliminating them can backfire.
Before you replace the spreadsheet, shut down the unofficial tracker, or tell everyone to follow the standard process, find out what problem the workaround solved.
You may decide the workaround is perfectly fine.
Or you may discover an opportunity to simplify the process, connect systems, automate repetitive work, improve reporting, or rethink how the work gets done altogether.
Either way, start by paying attention.
Because the workaround may not be the problem.
It may be the clearest clue you have about where the real problem is.
