What workarounds cost you

When a system doesn't work, people fix it themselves.

They add a column to a spreadsheet. They set a calendar reminder for something the software should be tracking. They message the same person every time because that person always knows the answer. They keep a personal copy of the data because the shared one is never right.

These fixes work. That's the problem.

The fix is invisible to anyone who didn't build it. It lives in someone's browser bookmarks, in a spreadsheet only they know about, in a workflow that breaks the moment they take a week off. The official system says everything is fine. The actual system is held together by workarounds nobody has ever written down.

The thing that makes it worse

The workaround becomes load-bearing.

Once people are used to working around a broken thing, the broken thing gets hard to fix. The workaround has its own users now. Its own edge cases. Its own person who understands it. Try to remove it, even to replace it with something better, and you have a change management problem on your hands that has nothing to do with the software.

I've seen teams resist fixing something they openly complained about for two years, because the fix required changing the workaround they'd built to deal with it. The broken thing had become part of the process.

How to find them

Before you redesign anything, find the workarounds.

Ask people how they actually do their job, not how the system expects them to. Look for spreadsheets that live outside the official tools. Find the manual steps nobody wrote down. Pay attention to the things people do at the start of every week "just to stay organized."

Those gaps are where the real design problems are. The space between how the software works and how the work actually gets done.

Some friction is useful. Not all of it is a problem to solve. But you have to understand which is which before you start redesigning anything, or you'll build a new system with the same gaps in different places.