The staff who absorbed the quirks are the ones who know the work

Years of accumulated workarounds live in people, not in documentation, and they are rarely asked.

In every institution there are a handful of people who can make things happen that the official process does not describe. They know which field is unreliable and why, which report is wrong on the first of the month, which request has to be worded a particular way to avoid being bounced, and which colleague will fix a problem quietly if asked before eleven. This knowledge was earned the hard way, over years, through repeated contact with the awkward parts of the work. It is almost never written down, because nobody has ever asked for it in a form that could be written.

When a change is planned without those people in the room, that knowledge does not transfer. It simply stops being useful, and the institution discovers a series of problems it thought it had never had, because in truth it always had them and someone was absorbing them invisibly. The new arrangement then acquires its own set of workarounds, developed under time pressure by people who are already busy, and the cycle begins again with less goodwill than before.

The remedy is unglamorous and cheap: sit with the people who do the task, watch them do it, and ask about the exceptions rather than the standard case. The standard case is already documented and is rarely where the difficulty lives. Ask what they do when something arrives late, when a detail is missing, when two records conflict, when someone is away. The answers to those questions are the actual process. Everything else is a description of it.