If Everyone Has Their Own Way of Doing It, You Don't Have a Process.

Ask how an invoice is approved, how a customer complaint is handled, how a change request is raised. If the answer begins with “it depends who you ask”, you do not have a process. You have a collection of habits.

Some variation is legitimate. Complex work needs judgement. A senior person will handle an exception that a junior person should escalate. That is not the problem. The problem is undocumented variation that nobody chose: five versions of the same work, none of them owned, all of them “how we do it here”.

This is where organisations confuse activity with a process. Work is getting done. Customers are being served, more or less. Therefore the process must exist. But a process is not the fact that work completes. It is a shared, repeatable way of completing it — one that can be taught, measured, and improved. If it cannot be shown to a new joiner without a shrug, it is not yet a process. It is folklore.

Folklore is expensive. It makes training a matter of sitting next to the right person. It makes quality a matter of who was on shift. It makes improvement impossible, because there is no “it” to improve — only individuals, each convinced their way is the way. When a system is later introduced, it has to pick a version. Three of the five ways of working become workarounds on day one.

The analysis is straightforward, even if the conversations are not. Map what people actually do. Name the differences. Decide which differences are judgement and which are drift. Write the agreed path down in language a tired person can follow. Then the organisation has something it can train, audit, and — if it still makes sense — automate.

You cannot improve what you cannot point to. And you cannot point to a process that exists only as “my way”.