The organisation removes the workaround without understanding the operational need that created it. In doing so, it can unknowingly remove an informal control, information source or decision mechanism that employees have developed to compensate for a weakness in the formal operating model.
- Frontline teams create workarounds for a reason, often because formal systems don’t adequately support how work actually needs to be performed.
- Formal processes and operational reality can diverge as people adapt prescribed ways of working to meet practical operational needs.
- Spreadsheets can reveal unmet information needs that existing systems, reports or processes have failed to recognise.
- Removing workarounds without understanding them can increase risk by eliminating controls or knowledge that have informally become part of the operating model.
- Organisational Change Management can uncover the behaviour behind the workaround and identify the underlying need rather than simply addressing the symptom.
- ERP and EAM implementations should learn from shadow systems because they provide valuable evidence of how people actually work and make decisions.
Real World
I have spent enough time around major programs to know that when somebody produces an unofficial spreadsheet, database or workaround, the immediate reaction is often, “We need to get rid of that.” I don’t see it that way anymore. Earlier in my career, I helped develop a defect management system intended to centralise maintenance defect management, preventive maintenance compliance and corrective maintenance across a workforce of around 5,000 people. Technically, the functionality wasn’t particularly complicated. What became complicated was discovering all the different ways people planned work, scheduled it, managed procurement, prioritised defects and allocated overtime.
That is why I am cautious when somebody tells me that a spreadsheet is the problem. The spreadsheet may actually be evidence of a problem. It may exist because the formal process doesn’t reflect how work really happens. After all, the system may not give somebody the information they need, or a business rule designed years ago may no longer make sense operationally. One lesson from that early CMMS implementation was not to hard-code every business rule into screens and validation. Organisations change. Processes change. People adapt. Before eliminating the workaround, I want to understand why an intelligent person thought they needed it in the first place.
Change Management Perspective
When I find spreadsheets sitting outside an organisation’s formal systems, my first instinct isn’t to remove them; it is to understand why they exist. From a change perspective, these workarounds are valuable evidence of the gap between the designed organisation and the lived organisation.
I want to understand what information people need, what decision the spreadsheet enables, why the formal process doesn’t support it and what would happen if we simply took it away. Only then should we decide whether the workaround needs to be incorporated, redesigned or retired. Sustainable change comes from understanding why people behave as they do before asking them to behave differently.
Key Takeaway
Before eliminating a workaround, understand the problem it is quietly solving.
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