When we start a new project, one of the first things we ask about is the workarounds. Not to judge them — but because they're usually the most honest picture of where the current system is failing.
A workaround is a signal. It means someone needed to do something the system couldn't do, so they found another way. That other way — the spreadsheet, the manual copy-paste, the WhatsApp group that functions as a CRM — tells you exactly where the gap is between what the business needs and what its tools provide.
We worked with a logistics company a while back whose operations team had built an elaborate colour-coding system in Excel to track job statuses. They'd been doing it for two years, updating it manually every morning. They knew it was inefficient. But it worked, and nothing in their actual system gave them the same visibility.
That spreadsheet told us almost everything we needed to know. The columns they'd added over time, the categories they'd created, the flags they'd built in — all of it was a map of what the business actually needed to see. We didn't ask them to describe the ideal system. We asked them to walk us through the spreadsheet.
The systems we build that work best are almost always grounded in that kind of detail. Not in an abstract vision of what technology should do, but in the specific things people have been doing manually because nothing else filled the gap.
It's worth taking your own workarounds seriously. If your team has developed informal processes around a system's limitations, those processes contain real knowledge about what the business needs. A good brief for a new system starts there — with a thorough inventory of every manual step, every parallel spreadsheet, every thing that someone does outside the official workflow.
That's usually where the problem is. And once you can see the problem clearly, the solution tends to follow.