The Process Nobody Owns

The process had been running for six years.

It survived three reorganizations, two system migrations, and four different team leads. It ran on a combination of a legacy database, a shared Google Sheet, and a cron job that someone had set up on a server nobody could locate.

Nobody currently in the building had created it. Everyone assumed someone else was responsible for it.

The Inheritance

This is what I call an inherited process -- something that persists not because anyone chose to keep it, but because nobody chose to stop it. It runs. It produces outputs. People downstream depend on those outputs. So it continues.

The original creator had left three years ago. Their manager had left a year after that. The documentation consisted of a single Confluence page last edited in 2021, with a broken screenshot and the note: "Talk to Marcus for details." Marcus, of course, no longer worked there.

When I mapped the process end to end, I found it touched five teams, generated three reports, and fed data into two dashboards. I also found that one of those reports went to a distribution list where every member had either left the company or changed roles.

The Reckoning

The inherited process was consuming roughly 15 hours of manual effort per week across three teams. Nobody questioned it because everyone assumed it was someone else's requirement.

When we finally gathered every stakeholder in one room and asked "Who needs this?", the silence was extraordinary. Twelve people. None of them needed it. All of them were feeding it.

Killing the process saved 780 hours a year. But the real lesson was simpler: the most dangerous processes in any organization are the ones that outlive the people who created them.