The work nobody wrote down is the work that breaks first

Every administrative operation I have been shown runs on two sets of procedures. There is the one in the manual, which is accurate, some years out of date, and consulted by nobody. And there is the one in the head of the person who has done the job since 2019, which is what actually happens on a Tuesday. The first is what gets handed to a new supplier. The second is what the work actually runs on.

That is not a criticism of the person. The procedure in their head is usually the more sophisticated of the two, because it has absorbed years of exceptions the manual never anticipated: the landlord who will only ever be telephoned, the block whose managing agent answers on Tuesdays and not before ten, the contractor whose invoices always arrive against the wrong reference and have to be matched by hand. None of that is written anywhere. All of it is load-bearing.

Where it goes wrong

An operation moves. The documented procedure travels with it, and for about three weeks everything appears to work, because the first three weeks are mostly the ordinary cases the manual describes properly. Then the exceptions start arriving. The new team handles them the way the document says, which is correct and wrong at the same time, and the complaints that follow get read as evidence that the outsourcing has failed.

It has not failed. The handover failed, some weeks earlier, when nobody wrote down the part that mattered. By the time anybody notices, the new team has been doing it the documented way for long enough that the client has lost confidence and the supplier has lost the argument.

What we do about it

We do not accept a written procedure as the basis of an engagement. Before a seat opens, somebody from here sits with the person who currently does the work and watches them do it, for as long as that takes, then writes down what they actually did rather than what the manual says they do. Four things get recorded that a procedure document almost never contains.

• What the task is, in the words of the person who does it rather than the words of whoever last updated the file.
• Every exception they can remember, and what they did about each one.
• Who they telephone when the procedure runs out, and why that person rather than another.
• What they would tell a new colleague on their first morning that is written down nowhere.

The output goes back to your own person to correct, because on this subject they are the authority and we are not. It is the one document in the engagement that we draft and you sign off rather than the other way round.

This is slower to start, and it is most of the reason we talk about months rather than weeks. It is also the only version of this that survives contact with a real week of work, which is the only test any of it has to pass.

None of it is peculiar to property, and none of it is peculiar to work that moves abroad. A desk that moves from one floor to another in the same building fails in exactly the same way. Distance only makes it slower to notice and more expensive to correct.

If your operation depends on one person who has never once been asked to write down what they know, that is worth putting right whether or not you ever speak to a firm like ours.

Egzon Hallaçi is a partner of the firm. He answers enquiries himself.