The Frankenstein Process

Nobody deliberately designs a terrible business process. Nobody sits down on Monday morning and says, “Let’s create something that requires five systems, three spreadsheets, eight employees, fourteen emails, and a procedure written in 2017.” Yet somehow, businesses end up with exactly that.

Meet the Frankenstein Process.

Like the famous monster, it was not created all at once. It was assembled piece by piece. One system was added to solve one problem. A spreadsheet was created because the system could not handle something. Another employee was added to the workflow because someone needed to double check the spreadsheet. An approval was introduced after a mistake. Then a new piece of software arrived, but the old one never completely disappeared. Eventually, all the pieces were stitched together. And somehow, the thing is still alive.

The strange part is that Frankenstein Processes can survive inside otherwise sophisticated companies for years. Everyone knows they are cumbersome, but they also work just well enough that replacing them never becomes urgent. That is how complexity wins.

Imagine a new employee joining the company. Their information begins in a recruiting system, gets entered again into an HR platform, appears on a spreadsheet for payroll, travels through email for benefits enrollment, and eventually reaches a manager who maintains their own separate tracking document. From the employee’s perspective, they simply started a job. Behind the scenes, eight people may have touched the same information.

Every handoff creates another opportunity for something to go wrong. A name gets entered differently. A deduction is missed. Someone forgets to forward an email. A manager uses an old version of a form. Payroll discovers the problem three weeks later and another workaround is created to prevent it from happening again. Another piece gets stitched onto the monster.

The problem is not that the people involved are doing bad work. Usually, the opposite is true. Employees become remarkably good at keeping complicated systems alive. They remember which spreadsheet matters, which field cannot be trusted, who needs to be copied on an email, and which unofficial step is required even though it appears nowhere in the written procedure. Eventually, that knowledge becomes part of the company. Until someone leaves. That is when businesses often discover how much of an important process existed only inside one person’s head.

For owners, this is where inconvenience becomes risk. Frankenstein Processes consume time, create unnecessary payroll costs, make training harder, increase the likelihood of mistakes, and make the business more dependent on individual employees. They also make growth harder.

A strange process may function perfectly well with twenty employees because one experienced person knows how to keep all the pieces connected. At seventy-five employees, the same process can become an administrative nightmare.

HR, payroll, and benefits are particularly vulnerable because they touch so many different parts of an organization. Hiring connects to onboarding. Onboarding connects to payroll. Payroll connects to timekeeping. Benefits connects to deductions. Employee changes connects to compliance and documentation. If each function has evolved independently for years, the result can become surprisingly complicated.

This is one of the areas where outsourcing HR and payroll can create value beyond simply removing work from an owner’s plate. A good outside partner can look at the entire process rather than each individual piece. Systems can be consolidated. Responsibilities can become clearer. Repetitive work can be removed. Information can move through fewer hands. The objective is not to introduce more complexity. It is to finally redesign the monster.

Find Your Frankenstein This October

If you own or lead a business, choose one recurring process and follow it from beginning to end. Write down every person who touches it, every system they open, every spreadsheet involved, every approval required, and every time the same information is entered twice. You may discover that the process is perfectly reasonable. Or you may find something assembled over eight years from old technology, temporary fixes, forgotten decisions, and the heroic memory of one employee who somehow keeps everything running. If you find the second one, don’t add another spreadsheet.

Before the year ends, ask a better question: If we were building this process today, would we ever build it this way?

If the answer is no, perhaps it is time to stop repairing the monster and start building something better.