Why Your Process Documentation is Lying to You (And What to Do About It)
- Lee Richmond
- Jan 13
- 4 min read
Every enterprise has thick binders or SharePoint folders full of process documentation. Flowcharts showing how orders are processed, how approvals flow, how data moves through systems. There is just one problem: almost none of it reflects what actually happens.
Reality Check: Research shows that 70% of documented business processes diverge significantly from actual practice within six months of documentation.
The Documentation Illusion
Let us walk through a common scenario. Your organization decides to document its order-to-cash process. You do everything right:
Interview stakeholders across departments
Map out the intended process flow
Create detailed BPMN diagrams
Get sign-off from department heads
File it away as your official process documentation
Six months later, when you actually trace how a specific order moved through your system, you discover:
Three approval steps that are routinely skipped
A critical data transformation happening in a spreadsheet nobody mentioned
Orders routing through a system that was supposedly retired
Manual interventions at five points where automation was assumed
Your documented process and your actual process bear only a passing resemblance to each other.
Why Documentation Diverges From Reality
1. The Telephone Game Effect
Process documentation relies on people describing what they think happens. But each person only sees their part of the process. They describe the ideal flow, not the exceptions and workarounds they have quietly developed. By the time you synthesize all these descriptions into a single process map, you have created a fiction—a composite of aspirations rather than reality.
2. Process Drift
Processes do not stay static. Systems get updated. Employees find shortcuts. New regulations require additional steps. Market conditions change priorities. Each small adaptation makes sense in isolation, but collectively they create a process that bears little resemblance to the documented version.
The documented process becomes increasingly obsolete, but nobody updates it because updating is expensive and time-consuming—so the gap widens.
3. Shadow Processes
The official process might say data flows from System A to System B. What it does not show is that Jane in accounting exports data to Excel every morning, manipulates it to fix formatting issues, then manually uploads it because the automated integration never quite worked right.
These shadow processes proliferate because they solve real problems. But they are invisible to process documentation—until something breaks or an auditor asks questions.
The Cost of the Documentation-Reality Gap
This gap is not just an academic problem. It creates real, measurable business impact:
Failed Automation Initiatives
You cannot automate what you do not accurately understand. Organizations spend millions on automation projects based on documented processes, only to discover mid-implementation that the real process is completely different. The project either fails or requires extensive rework.
Compliance Nightmares
Regulators are not interested in your documented processes—they want to know what actually happens. When auditors trace a specific transaction and discover it did not follow the documented process, the organization faces serious questions about control effectiveness.
Hidden Inefficiencies
If your documentation says a process takes three steps, but reality involves twelve, you cannot identify where inefficiency hides. You cannot optimize what you cannot see.
Risk Blindness
Shadow processes and undocumented workarounds create risk concentration. When Jane leaves the company, suddenly nobody knows how to make that critical data transfer happen. Your business continuity plans are based on processes that do not exist.
The Traditional Response Does Not Work
The typical organizational response to outdated documentation is: Let us document everything again, but better this time.
So you hire consultants. You interview everyone. You create even more detailed process maps. You establish a quarterly review cycle.
And within six months, the documentation is outdated again. Why? Because the fundamental problem is not the quality of documentation—it is the approach itself.
The problem: Manual process documentation creates a snapshot that is obsolete the moment it is completed.
The Solution: Automated Process Discovery
Instead of asking people what happens, what if you could observe what actually happens?
Modern process intelligence platforms trace actual data flows through your systems in real-time. They watch what your applications and databases actually do—not what the documentation says they should do.
This approach delivers:
Truth, Not Opinion
Process maps built from actual system behavior cannot be wrong—they show mathematical reality. If data flows from System A through Excel to System B, that is what the map shows, regardless of what the official documentation claims.
Continuous Updates
As processes evolve, the documentation evolves with them—automatically. Process drift becomes visible the moment it occurs, not six months later during an audit.
Complete Visibility
Shadow processes cannot hide from automated discovery. That Excel-based workaround shows up in the data flows. Manual interventions become visible as process variations.
Trustworthy Foundation
When you base automation initiatives, compliance programs, or optimization efforts on accurate process intelligence, they actually work—because they address reality, not aspirational documentation.
What This Means for Your Organization
Ask yourself these questions:
When was the last time you traced an actual transaction through your documented process and found they matched perfectly?
How many automation projects have been derailed by discovering the real process differs from the documentation?
Could you confidently show a regulator exactly how a specific transaction was processed, with complete data lineage?
How much time does your team spend updating process documentation that nobody trusts anyway?
If these questions make you uncomfortable, you are not alone. But continuing to base critical business decisions on documentation you know is inaccurate is a choice—and increasingly, a risky one.
The technology exists to see your processes as they really are, updated continuously, with mathematical certainty. The question is whether you will embrace it before the gap between your documentation and reality becomes a crisis.
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About Praevisum
Praevisum Galen automatically discovers and maps your real business processes from actual data flows—no interviews, no consultants, no outdated documentation. See exactly how your organization operates, updated in real-time as processes evolve.
Learn more at www.praevisum.com
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