Undocumented process

A process that runs reliably and is written down nowhere.

It lives in the person who has done it longest. Not hidden, not guarded, just never asked for. Nobody wrote it because nobody designed it. It grew out of decisions taken years apart, each sensible at the time, and the reasoning left with the people who took them.

You find it by asking someone to state the rule. What comes back is either three different answers from three people, or one answer that runs for two sentences and stops at “it depends.” That stopping point is the finding. The work was described as a procedure and turned out to be a judgment.

Some of it genuinely cannot be written down. Michael Polanyi’s line, that we can know more than we can tell, holds in operations as well as anywhere else.

For automation the distinction is the whole job, because the first of the six conditions is a rule someone can state. So the writing down comes first, and it usually pays for itself before anything is built. Steps appear that nobody can justify, approvals route to people who left, and two departments turn out to be keeping the same list.

The exposure is the obvious one. An undocumented process has a single point of failure who takes holidays.