The Workaround Audit - Identifying where problems are already known to exist

In many organisations, senior managers try to distance themselves from the 'pain' of problems that they have the power, resources and authority to solve, pushing them down through the lower levels of the organisation until they reach someone who has no choice but to try and cope with the fall-out of a problem.

So what the person lower down does is develop a workaround, a way to circumvent or ameliorate the problem which is less efficient or effective that a proper solution would be, but which works well enough to get the job done (albeit at a continuous cost to the organisation.) Where an organisation has not previously had any commitment to continuous improvement, layers of workarounds may have built up over years.

However, one of the problems with workarounds is that they are only as good as the person who conceived them. Under pressure to get the work through, it is just as likely that a quick and dirty approach will be settled on that may not even be the best of the feasible workarounds that could have been considered.  As a result, there are costs to the organisation not just from the workaround itself, but also from the fact that the specific workaround is more costly than it needs to be.

The problem can be compounded when senior managers who have chosen to remain oblivious of the problem the workaround was designed to solve then try to eliminate the workaround as a source of waste without putting a permanent solution or even any solution in place.

One of the ways in which an organisation can find rapid improvements is to do a workaround audit. That is to catalogue every workaround that exists in the business, why it exists, what resources it consumes on an ongoing basis, what its existence has historically cost and whose problem it was to solve in the first place.

Once this is known, you can list the unsolved problems in the business that are costing resources and then start to look for permanent solutions. If a permanent solution isn't available, a second line of attack would be to see if there is a more efficient workaround that could do the job better.

However, we also need to consider why the workarounds existed in the first place. And this comes down to the connection between pain and authority. The organisation needs to maintain a memory of what problems have been raised with senior managers and what actions if any they have taken to solve them. Even where the problem is 'delegated' the onus should remain on the responsible senior manager to see that the problem is solved. And if it is solved by someone lower in the hierarchy putting in place a workaround then the senior manager should have to justify why a permanent solution wasn't put in place and why they abdicated responsibility.

Pain and authority should be bound together so that something is done rather than things being swept under the rug, where eventually they build up enough for people to start tripping over them.

The problem is that the power to compel accountability and the desire to evade accountability are often in the same person's hands. So short of regime change workarounds are likely to remain for some time to come.