Ops handbooks and RACI matrices get commissioned because a team wants a reference document. What they usually get, if the work is done properly, is something more valuable: a map of every place where the informal process and the documented process don’t match.

Those mismatches are almost never accidents. They’re workarounds for a broken handoff between two roles, or a decision nobody wanted to own, or a step that made sense when the team was three people and doesn’t anymore. Interviewing the people who actually do the work is what surfaces these, and it happens before a single page of the handbook gets written.

The temptation is to document the workaround as-is, since that’s what people actually do. Resist that. A documented workaround becomes a permanent one. Fix the handoff first, then write down the process that should have existed all along.