Temporary workarounds become infrastructure
A shortcut created for one urgent case can become an unofficial dependency for an entire team. At scale, local fixes start interacting.
Treat process debt as a system
Map dependencies, ownership and consequences around a meaningful flow. Choose improvements that reduce recurring cost and make the next change easier.
Three versions of the same customer state
Context
Sales, delivery and finance each maintained their own status when the original hand-off stopped matching the growing organisation.
Decision
The teams agreed which decisions required a shared source and which local views could remain.
Action
They established ownership, removed duplicate updates and migrated one high-volume journey first.
Takeaway
Reducing debt required alignment around decisions, not merely connecting every field.