The work sits in WhatsApp

I wrote the column version of this for Moneycontrol. The working underneath it is simpler, and less polite.

If you point an agent at the ticket system in a lot of Indian offices, you get a clean demo on a system that is not where the work happens. The decision was in a WhatsApp group. The exception was a phone call. The constraint is in somebody’s head, and they will tell you if you ask, and they will not write it down because writing it down is not their job.

What breaks if you ignore that

You automate the record of the work, not the work. The ticket gets a summary. The chat keeps running the business. Six weeks later someone asks why the cycle time did not move. The cycle time was never in Jira.

This is not a romance about informal culture. It is a systems fact. If the approver is in a group chat, your gate has to know that, or you will build an approval no one uses and a shadow path everyone does.

What I do instead

Sit with the people who own the number and watch one real case through, including the bits that never got a ticket. Write down where it waited and who actually said yes. Then decide what can be drafted, and what still needs that person. Sometimes the honest answer is: almost nothing can be executed until the chat is no longer the system of record.

That last sentence is not a reason to wait for a transformation programme. It is a reason to stop selling a handover you cannot see. Baseline the messy path first. Then put a gate on the one write you can actually name.