The COO built an onboarding checklist tool

“The budget expires this week.”— Group Controller

Reason:

Allegedly because procurement needs three quotes for something costing €240,000. Started as Budget2026_use-this-one.csv with a script attached.

Built by:

Katrin, an analyst

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

a Slack bot doing database writes

Database:

Jira custom fields, somehow

Authentication:

the app is secure because it has a padlock icon

Deployment:

deployed by dragging files into an FTP client

Responsible:

Bastian, because they clicked "create project" first

Documentation:

a Confluence page marked "draft", last edited 141 days ago

Security situation:

the privacy policy refers to a different application

Future disaster:

It will discover its own timezone policy in production.

Age: 1.1 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 1 owner so far · last meaningful change 74 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 3 departments depend on it, 27 users, alive 19x longer than intended.