This study examines how some employees coped with the exceptions that they encountered with their on-going use of a co-operative work-flow technology in an optronics company. By drawing on the case material, this paper will indicate that approaches which view work as being capable of being planned and managed through the formal authority of the hierarchy are insufficient, and instead this paper will suggest that exception handling, work-arounds and improvisation are more characteristic of human activity. The theoretical framework for the interpretive study was based on structuration theory. Structuration theory provides a theoretical lens that conceptualises action and structure as a duality, and emphasises how activity is both enabled and constrained. The principles underlying ethnography have informed the research approach.