Software you pay for that nobody opens
Somewhere in the business there is a system that cost money, took weeks to set up, and is now being worked around by a spreadsheet. The system still runs. The subscription still goes out each month. But the work happens in a file somebody built one afternoon because it did the thing they needed, in the way they needed it done.
This is a design problem, not a discipline problem. The system was bought to solve a general version of the job. The team needed the specific one done.
How it happens
Most off-the-shelf software is built for the middle of the market. It handles the common case well enough, and then asks the business to change its process to fit everything else. For a while, people try. They go to the training, follow the workflow, log things in the right place. Then someone builds a spreadsheet that does the one job they need, and the rest of the team starts using that instead.
Nobody cancels the system. They stop opening it, and the business runs on the workaround.
What it costs
The licence fee is the obvious cost, and the least important one. The real cost is the gap between the two systems. Data lives in one place and decisions get made in another. Reports come from the platform, and the numbers people trust come from the spreadsheet. New starters learn the official process and then get told how things actually work.
That gap is where the errors live, where the time goes, and where nobody is quite sure which version is right.
What the spreadsheet is telling you
When a team builds its own workaround, it’s telling you what the job actually looks like, as opposed to what the vendor assumed it looked like. The spreadsheet is usually ugly, fragile and understood by one person. It’s also shaped exactly like the problem.
So the question to ask is whether the system was ever the right shape for the work, rather than how to get people back into it.
What to do about it
Find the workarounds first. Ask each team what they keep in a spreadsheet, and why. There are usually more than anyone expected.
Then take each one and decide. Some exist because nobody set the system up properly, and an afternoon fixes them. Some exist because the process changed and the system didn’t, and the process is the thing to write down. Some exist because the tool was never the right shape, and the honest answer is to cancel it and stop paying for something the business runs next to.
And some are telling you the business needs something built around how it actually works. That used to be the expensive option, but it’s less so now. For a system at the centre of a business, owning one that fits often works better than renting one that nearly does. We build systems like this ourselves, so that’s a view with an interest behind it. It isn’t the answer for everything, but it belongs on the list alongside the other three: fix the setup, write the process down, or cancel the tool.