How to document company processes that only exist in people's heads
Internal processes are usually fragmented across employees' minds with conflicting versions depending on who you ask, making standard documentation efforts take months instead of weeks. This leaves companies dependent on a 'bus factor of one' where critical knowledge disappears when key personnel leave or retire, resulting in written manuals that bear no resemblance to how work actually gets done.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1relying on institutional memory and informal day-to-day functioning
- 2using the decision tree method to map out conditions and actions
- 3prioritizing processes by risk and focusing only on the top critical workflows
- 4framing documentation requests around the risk of key personnel leaving or winning the lottery
- 5keeping documentation high level and having respective teams drill down on their own
- 6Writing a new handover document from scratch
- 7Directing coworkers to use the official documentation
- 8Using AI to clean up and summarize personal notes
- 9Using Miro to capture messy current states with real examples, photos, and sticky notes before transferring ideas elsewhere
- 10Committing to both tools by using Miro for discovery and Lucidchart for formal documentation
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Started a documentation project thinking it would take a few weeks and here I am three months later understanding why companies hire consultants for this.”source ↗
“Every time I ask someone how they do something the answer is "it depends" followed by fifteen edge cases, stuff that's supposedly standardized has three different versions depending on who you ask, and critical knowledge lives entirely in the heads of people who could leave tomorrow.”source ↗
“I will soon be taking a long leave so my coworkers expect me to write some sort of handover documentation or do a knowledge transfer . I'm okay with showing them how to handle different situations and explaining how it works but I don't want to write something.”source ↗
“When they saw me looking at my personal notes on my laptop, some of them say that I should just gave them my notes. I don't want to do that for many reasons:”source ↗
“How to tell my coworkers that I don't want to share my personal notes without being seen as selfish? And how to do a knowledge transfer if I don't want to share them?”source ↗
“Dispatchers didn't naturally describe their work as tidy process steps. They walked us through screenshots, WhatsApp threads, route sheets, customer calls, and workarounds. When we tried fitting everything straight into a formal diagram, people began oversimplifying too early.”source ↗
“My company is so lean, my projects usually have a bus factor of one.”source ↗
“I'm three years into attempting to document and revise our processes.”source ↗
“That system goes down and we’re fucked. He’s retiring in May.”source ↗
“What the organisation thought they knew and what they actually did where actually completely two different things, what they had done was document a version of reality that reflected nothing like what they actually did.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 4Why does software become just a system of record?
- 2Why does team documentation always go out of date?
- 5How to stop juggling bookmarks for admin tools and reference sites
- 9How to handle undocumented legacy database changes
- 2Why is keeping a professional network CRM updated so tedious?
- 6Why do simple CRM automations get so complicated?