How it accumulates
- A temporary spreadsheet becomes permanent.
- A rule lives in one person's judgment and is never written.
- Two systems are 'kept in sync' by a human.
- An exception process is used more often than the standard one.
When the bill arrives
Growth, absence and turnover. Each one exposes the assumptions no process ever documented, which is why a company can run smoothly for years and then appear to break in a single quarter.
Paying it down
Pick the workaround that consumes the most time each week. Write down the actual process. Remove the re-entry. Move the rule into the system. Then repeat. The payoff compounds in the same way the debt did.