The workaround is the real requirements document.
Every organisation I have walked into has a spreadsheet nobody talks about. It lives on one person's desktop. It has their initials in the filename. And when you ask about it they get slightly embarrassed, as though they have been caught doing something wrong.
They have not. They have been doing your requirements gathering for you, unpaid, for about three years.
Why it exists
A workaround is what happens when a system asks for something the work cannot give it. Somebody needed a field that was not there, or a step that took four clicks and needed to take one, or an answer the report would not produce. So they built the smallest possible thing that let them get on with their day.
That small thing is now load-bearing. And because it was never sanctioned, it is invisible to everyone who might have fixed the underlying problem.
The system is the draft. The workaround is the final version.
What most people do with it
They kill it. Somebody notices the shadow spreadsheet, calls it a compliance risk, and mandates that everyone use the official system. This feels like leadership. It is actually the fastest way to lose the only accurate record of what the work needs.
The workaround does not go away. It goes further underground, and now you have the same gap plus a team that has learned not to tell you things.
What to do instead
Ask to see it. Not in a meeting. At their desk, with them driving, while they talk you through a real week. Ask why each column is there. Every one of them is an answer to a question your system failed to ask.
Then do the unglamorous thing: make the official system do those things, and retire the workaround by making it pointless rather than forbidden. If the sanctioned path is genuinely faster, nobody needs a policy to choose it.
The tell
You will know you have found the real problem when the person apologising for the spreadsheet stops apologising and starts explaining. That shift, from embarrassment to expertise, usually happens about ninety seconds in, and everything they say after it is worth more than the brief you were handed.