Why Your Off-the-Shelf Software Needs 6 Workarounds

In the workflows we’ve been asked to audit and automate, six to ten is the routine count. To count yours, ask your operations team to list every step in their daily workflow that involves moving data between systems manually. Every CSV export. Every copy-paste between screens. Every 'we download the report, fix it in a spreadsheet, then upload it back.' Every time someone says 'the system doesn’t support that, so we...' and describes a manual process.

Some workarounds are small — a five-minute daily ritual that nobody questions. Others consume hours. All of them exist because the software your organization bought doesn’t match how your organization actually works.

This isn’t the vendor’s fault. Off-the-shelf software is built for the average customer’s workflow. Your workflow isn’t average — it’s yours. The gap between what the tool assumes and what your team actually does is where workarounds live. And every workaround is a process that could break, that depends on someone remembering to do it, and that won’t survive a change in personnel.

A single workaround is annoying. Six workarounds are a system — a fragile, undocumented, person-dependent system that runs alongside your actual software. The compound effect is worse than the sum of individual workarounds because they interact.

The CSV export you run on Monday morning depends on the manual cleanup someone did on Friday afternoon. The report your manager reviews depends on a data transformation that happens in a spreadsheet that three people maintain separately. When one workaround fails or runs late, the downstream workarounds produce wrong results — and nobody notices until the error surfaces in a customer-facing output.

The compounding also affects onboarding. Every new hire learns two systems: the official software and the informal workaround layer that makes it actually useful. Training documents describe the software. The workarounds live in tribal knowledge, passed person to person. When three people leave in the same quarter, the workaround layer breaks and nobody remaining knows how to fix it. A workaround-heavy tool is also sign four of the five signs your team needs custom automation.

The tool becomes the problem when the workaround burden exceeds the value it provides. Past that point, your team is spending more time making the software work than the software saves them — the tool that was supposed to eliminate manual work has become the source of it.

The honest assessment is straightforward. Add up the hours your team spends on workarounds each week. Compare that to the hours the software saves compared to having no software at all. If the gap is small — or negative — the tool isn’t serving you anymore. It’s consuming you.

The alternative isn’t always custom software. Sometimes it’s a different off-the-shelf product that fits your workflow better. Sometimes it’s a thin automation layer that bridges the gaps between your current tool and your actual process — eliminating the workarounds without replacing the whole system. The right answer depends on where the mismatch lives: if it’s one or two gaps, bridge them. If it’s fundamental, replace the tool. Either way, the first step is the same: count the workarounds, measure the hours, and stop pretending 'good enough' is free. Then run the ROI arithmetic on what you counted.