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 the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- The most recent one is from October 2026.
- This comes up 226.8× more often in r/projectmanagement than across the site as a whole.
- 2 of the 9 people here also raised “Why is project management just doing admin and updating trackers?”
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1relying on institutional memory and informal day-to-day functioningDid this help you?
- 2using the decision tree method to map out conditions and actionsDid this help you?
- 3prioritizing processes by risk and focusing only on the top critical workflowsDid this help you?
- 4framing documentation requests around the risk of key personnel leaving or winning the lotteryDid this help you?
- 5keeping documentation high level and having respective teams drill down on their ownDid this help you?
- 6Writing a new handover document from scratchDid this help you?
- 7Directing coworkers to use the official documentationDid this help you?
- 8Using AI to clean up and summarize personal notesDid this help you?
- 9Using Miro to capture messy current states with real examples, photos, and sticky notes before transferring ideas elsewhereDid this help you?
- 10Committing to both tools by using Miro for discovery and Lucidchart for formal documentationDid this help you?
- 11running the business in your headDid this help you?
- 12Using general diagramming and docs tools like Lucidchart, Drawio, Miro, and Google DocsDid this help you?
- 13In-person workshops with shop floor teams using coffee, biscuits, and post-it notesDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, 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 ↗
“we don't know what's happening because we don't have anything documented”source ↗
“SOPs become outdated quickly”source ↗
“Most people "don't have time" to draw their workflows, so most manual work never gets uncovered or documented”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 ↗
“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 ↗
“Incredibly difficult to grow a team without SOPs. After being solo for 5 years I hired two people and realized we needed some stuff laid out or id be permanently the bottleneck”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 4Why does software become just a system of record?
- 5Why does team documentation always go out of date?
- 5How to track down undocumented scripts across inherited systems
- 2How to tell if your work computer or classroom is being secretly watched
- 5How to stop juggling bookmarks for admin tools and reference sites
- 2When is it time to stop using spreadsheets for business operations?