Software teams have technical debt. Operations have the same problem, with no name for it.
Software teams know technical debt: the cost of shortcuts taken to move fast, which slows everything until paid off. Operations teams carry the same thing and rarely name it.
Process debt looks like this. A manual workaround from a busy quarter that was never automated. An approval step added after one incident that now applies to every transaction, whatever the size. Three departments each keeping their own "customer list" because nobody owns one. Each was often the right call under time pressure. The trouble is when dozens pile up.
Onboarding takes longer, because new staff must learn workarounds that appear in no official process.
Small requests take too long, because they route through approvals designed for a bigger problem.
Nobody can say how a process really works, only how it is meant to work on paper.
Improvement projects stall, because half the effort goes into finding out the current undocumented state.
Not one heroic re-engineering project; those rarely survive daily operations. A habit instead. When a workaround becomes permanent, document it or remove it. When an approval is added for an exception, set a date to remove it once the exception passes. Track process complexity the way software teams track technical debt. Organizations that let it build up find that their biggest limit on growth is not the market. It is their own operations.