You Bought the System. So Why Is the Work Still Being Done in Spreadsheets?
Every organisation has a layer of spreadsheets, shared mailboxes and personal databases holding the real work together. It is usually treated as a risk to stamp out. It is far more useful read as a list of everything the official systems do not do.
Somewhere in every organisation is a layer nobody designed. Spreadsheets, shared mailboxes, personal databases, a macro somebody wrote years ago that half a department depends on.
It exists alongside systems that cost a great deal of money, and it is where a surprising amount of the actual work happens.
1. The Layer Nobody Designed
It rarely appears on an architecture diagram. It has no owner, no support arrangement and no budget line — and it is invisible until the person who maintains it leaves.
Ask anyone who does the work and they will show you in seconds. Ask the system’s owner and you will often get genuine surprise.
That gap between the two answers is worth paying attention to.
2. It Is Not Defiance
The instinct is to treat all of this as non-compliance — people going around the process because they cannot be bothered to learn the system.
That is almost never what happened. Somebody had a job to do, the system could not do it, and the choice was a workaround or not doing the job. They chose the job, which is what you would want them to do.
Understanding that changes the conversation entirely. These are not people avoiding the system. They are people covering for it.
3. The Risk Is Real, Just Not Where People Look
None of which makes it safe. A process held together this way has no audit trail, no version control and no continuity when somebody is off sick.
The exposure is rarely the spreadsheet itself. It is that one person understands it and nobody has ever asked them how it works.
Worth noting too that the numbers it produces usually end up somewhere official — a board report, a regulatory return, an invoice run.
The quieter exposure is the logic inside it. A workaround carries its own set of business rules — decisions about rounding, exclusions and which cases to leave out — made once, by one person, and reviewed by nobody since.
4. Banning It Only Moves It
The common response is a crackdown. Lock down the drives, ban the local databases, mandate the system.
What follows is predictable. The work still needs doing, so the workaround moves somewhere less visible — a personal device, a private mailbox, a tool nobody in IT has heard of.
You have not removed the risk. You have removed your view of it.
5. Read It as a Requirements List
The more useful move costs almost nothing. Go and find the workarounds, and treat each one as a requirement that somebody wrote down and nobody read.
Every spreadsheet answers a question: what does this system fail to do that the job needs? The answer is already specified, already tested against reality and already in use.
Most requirements gathering would be improved by starting here rather than with a workshop.
6. The Pattern Matters More Than the Items
Individually they look like clutter. Collectively they form a map — and where they cluster tells you something quite specific.
- several around one process usually means the process was never designed, only automated
- several at the joins between teams means an integration problem, not a system problem
- several producing reports means the reporting people need is not the reporting they were given
- several correcting the same data means something upstream is broken
That reading takes an afternoon and is worth more than most maturity assessments.
7. Then Decide, Deliberately
Not all of it should be absorbed into the system. Some of it is genuinely local, changes constantly, and would be worse for being formalised.
The honest triage is by risk and volume. Absorb the few that carry real exposure, support a few more as tools in their own right, and let the rest be. The temptation is to absorb everything — which produces a system heavier and slower than the one people were working around in the first place.
What matters is that each one has been looked at and a decision taken, rather than tolerated in the dark or banned on principle.
8. The Real Measure of a System
A system is not judged by what it does. It is judged by how much people have to do around it to get through the day.
If that number is high, the platform is not finished — whatever the programme closure report said.
Count the spreadsheets. They are the most honest piece of user research you will ever get, and nobody has to be asked to produce them.