When the Process Outlives the Person
Part One: The £50 Problem
Four months after being made redundant, I received an email from my former employer asking me to resolve an outstanding expense of approximately £50.
At first, I assumed it was a mistake; perhaps an old distribution list hadn’t been updated, or an automated system was still sending notifications to an account that should no longer exist.
But that wasn’t quite what had happened — the email had been sent to my personal email address, which hadn’t previously been included in the correspondence. Someone appeared to have deliberately added me to an internal financial process, despite the fact that I had left the organisation four months earlier.
The outstanding transaction appeared to relate to a software tool I had previously managed but there was just one rather obvious problem…
I no longer worked there.
My position had been made redundant — access to the organisation’s systems had been removed and my responsibilities should have been redistributed, and whatever arrangements were necessary to maintain the systems and services I previously managed should have been established as part of that transition.
Yet here I was, four months later, apparently being asked to resolve an administrative issue through a system I could no longer access.
Naturally I found myself wondering what, precisely, the organisation expected me to do about it…
Was I supposed to log into a system for which I no longer had credentials?
Contact the finance department on behalf of a company that no longer employed me?
Or perhaps simply accept that, despite being made redundant, I remained somehow responsible for the administrative consequences of my former role?
The amount involved was almost comically insignificant — about £50… yet the organisation had apparently decided that the appropriate response was to involve a former employee rather than resolve the matter internally.
It would be easy to dismiss this as a minor administrative oversight. After all, organisations make mistakes, and £50 is hardly a significant sum for a multinational, multi-billion dollar business is it…?
But I think that misses something rather important.
The interesting question isn’t why the organisation was chasing £50, it’s why the organisation still appeared to consider someone it had made redundant responsible for resolving it.
This distinction matters because this isn’t fundamentally a story about expenses, software subscriptions or administrative incompetence. It’s about what happens when organisations confuse removing a position with removing the work that position performed.
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And it raises a much more uncomfortable question…
If an organisation decides a role is no longer necessary, but its processes continue to depend on the person who occupied that role, how well did it actually understand the work being done?
Part Two: The Illusion of Efficiency
Organisations are remarkably good at calculating the savings from removing positions but they’re less effective at measuring the work that remains.
Eliminating a role doesn’t eliminate its responsibilities; systems still need maintaining, suppliers still need managing, and decisions still need to be made.
The assumption is often that existing employees can absorb these responsibilities but absorbing work and taking ownership of it are two very different things.
A responsibility without a clearly identified owner hasn’t been redistributed. It’s simply been abandoned.
The financial savings are immediately visible, yet the resulting inefficiencies are not. They’re dispersed across departments, hidden in administrative processes and absorbed into workloads.
A £50 expense might seem insignificant, but how much time and effort does an organisation spend resolving something that should never have become a problem?
Reducing headcount doesn’t necessarily reduce workload. Sometimes it simply makes the remaining work more complicated.
And that raises a question organisations rarely seem to ask: did we actually understand the work before deciding the position was unnecessary?
Part Three: When Nobody Questions the Process
One of the more frustrating characteristics of large organisations is their tendency to follow established processes without questioning whether those processes still make sense.
Systems generate reminders, departments chase outstanding actions, and employees typically follow procedures because that’s what they’re expected to do… but processes don’t understand context.
Processes don’t recognise that responsibilities have changed, that organisational structures have been redesigned or that the person previously responsible no longer works there.
People are supposed to recognise those things.
The problem isn’t that an automated system generated a reminder. It’s that someone apparently decided contacting a former employee was a reasonable way to resolve it.
This is where process compliance becomes a substitute for judgement.
Rather than questioning why an issue remains unresolved, organisations can become preoccupied with ensuring the next procedural step is completed.
The process continues, even when the logic supporting it has disappeared and perhaps that’s the most revealing aspect of the entire situation.
The organisation knew how to chase the outstanding expense. What it apparently didn’t know was who should be responsible for resolving it.
Originally published at https://complexityclarified.co.uk on November 4, 2026.
