A VP of Support showed me a document once.
Not a dashboard. Not a report. A document. Maintained by hand.
Every escalation, logged. The date it came in. The cases attached. The deploy that turned out to be the cause. What the team checked first, and what it actually was. Row after row, going back more than a year.
It was good. Genuinely good. The best correlation system in the building.
It just wasn’t a system. It was a person.
Here is what that document actually was.
It was the investigation cost, written down.
Every row started as an incident. Something broke. Someone opened Salesforce, read the case, then opened Jira, then GitHub, found the deploy, matched the timestamp. Hours of manual work. And when it was done, one person typed the result into a row so the next person wouldn’t start from zero.
The document existed because the tools don’t connect. Salesforce had the case. Jira had the ticket. GitHub had the deploy. None of them knew about the others. So a human joined them by hand, then wrote down the join.
That is not a filing habit. That is infrastructure. Built by one person. Kept alive by one person.
I asked what happens when she’s out.
She laughed. Then she stopped laughing.
Because the document goes stale the moment she stops feeding it. The next escalation lands. Someone runs the investigation again, from scratch; because they don’t know the doc exists, or they can’t find it, or they don’t know the shorthand she uses in column D. The work still gets done. It just doesn’t get written down. And the row that would have saved the next person never gets created.
The knowledge is in the document. The ability to use the document is in her head.
Both are load-bearing. Only one of them takes PTO.
This is the part that makes a good workaround dangerous.
A bad workaround gets noticed. It fails often enough that someone replaces it. A good workaround gets trusted. It works, so the team leans on it, so it quietly becomes the thing holding the whole escalation process together. Nobody flags it. Why would they? It works.
The better the workaround, the more weight it carries. The more weight it carries, the worse the day it breaks.
And it breaks the way all of them break. Not with a system failure. With a person out of office.
The document is not a solution. It is evidence.
Evidence that the correlation work is real. Evidence that it happens often enough to justify building infrastructure for it by hand. Evidence that the investigation cost is high enough that someone, uncompensated for it, decided to keep a ledger.
And evidence that the ledger has exactly one dependency. Not a server. Not a license.
A person.
Teams running the whole escalation process on a hand-maintained doc; the best workaround in the building, quietly holding up more than anyone admits; are exactly who we’re thinking about.
If that’s your team, we offer a complimentary Investigation Cost Audit. Forty-five minutes. Structured diagnostic across five dimensions. You leave with a scorecard that quantifies what the investigation is actually costing you: in time, in recurrence, in the workarounds your team built because the systems never did.