Leadership

Operational Debt: How to Find and Fix Hidden Workarounds

Imagine this scenario: A client-onboarding process looks healthy right up until the person who quietly holds it together takes time off.

The process appears to work because an experienced employee knows the unwritten steps, the relationships behind them, and the extra assistance that keeps new clients moving. When that employee goes on PTO, other people discover that parts of the process are not documented. They cannot easily step in. Some of the additional support has also drifted beyond what the organization is actually supposed to provide.

This is a hypothetical scenario, not an account of a specific workplace event. The employee is delivering excellent customer service, but the organization has also allowed that effort to become a hidden dependency and an informal promise to clients. Both things can be true.

That is operational debt: the accumulated cost and risk of temporary workarounds, manual handoffs, duplicate entry, undocumented exceptions, one-off spreadsheets, and person-dependent knowledge that quietly become the normal way work gets done.

Technical debt lives in code. Operational debt lives in everything a team explains with, “That’s just how we do it.”

Your Best Employees May Be Hiding Operational Debt

The employees most likely to conceal a weak process are often the people leaders trust most. They remember which client needs a special reminder, which spreadsheet must be updated after the official system, and who can resolve an exception quickly. Their judgment keeps work moving.

That competence creates a dangerous illusion. Leaders see acceptable outcomes and conclude that the process works. They do not see the extra messages, memory, rework, and personal relationships required to produce those outcomes.

There is also an incentive problem. When a capable employee raises a process gap, the response may be, “Good catch. Can you fix it?” The person who exposes the debt inherits another job. After that happens a few times, silence becomes rational.

Leaders should not treat this as an employee failure. Someone who goes beyond the written process may be protecting clients and preserving service quality. The management failure is allowing valuable individual knowledge to remain invisible, unscoped, and unavailable to the rest of the organization.

APQC surveyed 982 full-time knowledge workers and found that they considered only 30 hours of a typical 40-hour week productive. Respondents reported spending 3.6 hours managing internal communication, 2.8 hours looking for needed information, and 2.2 hours in unnecessary or unproductive meetings. APQC also identified broken-process workarounds, recreated information, and searches for the right expert as productivity drains. Importantly, its research points to employee empowerment, process simplification, and critical-knowledge documentation as practical responses. 1

Those findings describe what operational debt feels like from inside the work. It rarely arrives as one dramatic failure. It appears as minutes lost, questions repeated, data copied, and exceptions remembered. The cost accumulates while the process still appears functional.

When Excellent Service Creates Expectation Debt

This hypothetical onboarding scenario contains another complication. Some of the employee’s extra help benefits clients but falls outside the intended service. Once that help is delivered consistently, clients may reasonably begin to expect it.

This creates expectation debt. A courtesy becomes an unofficial feature. The organization has not designed, documented, staffed, or priced the service, yet removing it may feel like a decline in quality.

Leaders must make an explicit decision. They can formally incorporate the additional service, assign resources, and define how it should work. They can also explain that the assistance falls outside scope and retire it thoughtfully. What they should not do is leave one employee responsible for maintaining an invisible promise.

This is why an operational debt audit cannot ask only, “How can we do this faster?” It must also ask, “Should we be doing this at all?” Automating out-of-scope work makes the organization more efficient at delivering a service it never chose to provide.

How to Conduct an Operational Debt Audit

An operational debt audit makes invisible work discussable. The goal is not to document every keystroke. It is to find places where the official process and the real process have separated.

Start by listening for phrases that reveal hidden dependencies:

“Ask the person who normally handles it.”
“This is not documented, but here is what we do.”
“We track that in a separate spreadsheet.”
“The system cannot handle this exception.”
“We do it as a courtesy.”
“We always double-check that manually.”
“It is temporary.”

Then walk through the process with the people who perform it. Compare written procedures with actual behavior. Look at handoffs, duplicate touches, queues, exception logs, support requests, and recurring questions. Ask what would stop if a particular person were unavailable for two weeks.

Do not run the audit as an interrogation. Employees will hide workarounds if they believe transparency will produce blame or an immediate pile of extra assignments. Make it clear that identifying debt is valuable work and that reporting a problem does not automatically make someone its permanent owner.

Calculate the Interest You Are Paying

The simplest estimate captures recurring labor:

Minutes per occurrence × occurrences per week × working weeks × loaded hourly cost

Suppose a manual reconciliation takes five minutes and occurs 20 times each workday. Across 50 working weeks, that consumes more than 400 hours per year. The arithmetic does not prove that automation is the answer, but it makes the recurring cost visible.

Labor is only the first layer. Each backlog item should also consider:

Errors and rework
Delays and queue time
Customer impact
Scope expansion
Compliance or operational risk
Dependence on a particular employee
Difficulty scaling as volume grows

Some low-frequency workarounds deserve immediate attention because a single failure would be severe. Other items may be safe but expensive. The estimate should inform judgment, not replace it.

Build an Operational Debt Backlog

Software teams do not expect to eliminate technical debt in one project. They identify it, prioritize it, and make deliberate decisions about when to address it. Operations teams can use the same discipline.

Every confirmed workaround should enter an operational debt backlog. A useful entry includes the affected process, description, owner, importance, urgency, estimated time saved, annual labor estimate, risk, customer impact, proposed treatment, target date, and current status.

The three primary scores can remain simple:

Importance: How much does the process affect clients, employees, or business outcomes?
Urgency: How soon could the workaround create disruption or unacceptable risk?
Time saved: How much capacity could the organization reclaim by resolving it?

Organizations can weight those factors differently. Risk and customer impact should act as modifiers so a rare but dangerous failure does not fall to the bottom of the list.

The backlog also gives employees somewhere to place a problem besides their personal task list. That changes the conversation from “Can you fix this?” to “How should the organization prioritize this?”

Choose the Right Treatment Before You Automate

Each operational debt item needs a disposition. There are five practical options:

Eliminate: Stop work that is unnecessary or outside the intended service.
Simplify: Remove steps, approvals, or handoffs before adding technology.
Automate: Use technology for stable, repetitive, well-understood work.
Document: Capture necessary knowledge, exceptions, decisions, and handoffs.
Assign: Establish clear ownership when responsibility is ambiguous.

Automation should come after the process makes sense. IBM’s Finance Pricing team offers a useful example. A regional project first automated 4,800 hours of manual data gathering, calculations, and entry each year. As the work expanded, the team evaluated processes with their owners before automating them. IBM reports that the larger effort eventually eliminated about 35,000 manual hours annually and reduced average bid cycle time by 75 percent. One project leader summarized the order plainly: automation is the last step because there is no value in automating work that does not make sense. 2

That sequence matters. A bot can copy unnecessary data faster. It cannot decide whether the duplicate record should exist. A workflow can route an exception instantly. It cannot determine whether the organization should continue offering the exception.

The Operational Debt Management Loop

The backlog should operate as a continuous management system, not a one-time cleanup project.

A recurring operational debt loop prevents temporary workarounds from disappearing back into daily work.

Backlog grooming may be one of the rare meetings worth adding. Review it weekly when debt is accumulating quickly or every other week when the flow is manageable. Each active item should leave the meeting with an owner, a next action, and a review date.

Without that cadence, the backlog becomes one more place where known problems wait indefinitely. The meeting must include someone with authority to allocate time, accept risk, clarify scope, or stop unnecessary work.

Measure Reclaimed Capacity, Not Employee Worth

A scoreboard can reinforce the right behavior if it measures the system rather than ranking people. Track estimated and verified hours reclaimed, manual steps removed, dependencies reduced, processes documented, errors prevented, and out-of-scope activities eliminated or formally adopted.

Use estimates honestly. Time saved on paper is not always capacity recovered in practice. Verify results where possible and avoid treating every saved hour as a staffing reduction. Reclaimed time may improve response speed, reduce burnout, strengthen controls, or allow employees to focus on work that requires judgment.

Most importantly, recognize the people who expose operational debt. Their willingness to describe the real process is an early-warning system. Rewarding transparency makes it more likely that the next workaround enters the backlog before it becomes a hidden workflow.

Make the Invisible Work Visible

In this scenario, the onboarding process does not become fragile when an employee takes PTO. The fragility already exists. The absence merely makes it visible.

That distinction matters for leaders. Strong employees often protect an organization from the immediate consequences of weak systems. Their extra effort can preserve client relationships and keep work moving, but it can also postpone the moment when leadership must confront undocumented knowledge, unclear scope, and recurring manual effort.

Moving quickly sometimes requires a workaround. The mistake is allowing “temporary” to become permanent without an owner, expiration date, or review. Put the workaround in a backlog. Calculate its interest. Decide whether to eliminate, simplify, automate, document, or assign it.

Your best employees should help improve the system. They should not have to be the system.

By Shawn Skonberg

Shawn Skonberg writes about practical systems, workflow documentation, automation, and reducing unnecessary operational work. His work focuses on practical methods leaders can use to identify subtle process gaps before they become difficult to scale.