The Person Who Knows Excel built a tender response tracker

“It has a login screen.”— Jens, The Person Who Knows Excel

Reason:

Because Finance has a different spreadsheet. Quietly rolled out to five countries.

Built by:

Jens, a field technician

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

a Power Automate flow with 73 steps

Database:

an FTP server containing folders called NEW, NEW2 and FINAL

Authentication:

the app is secure because it has a padlock icon

Deployment:

running on a server nobody remembers provisioning

Responsible:

Operations, but they strongly disagree

Documentation:

a Jira ticket with 42 comments

Security situation:

rate limiting consists of hoping nobody notices

Future disaster:

It will get its own budget line before it gets an owner.

Age: 4.3 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 4 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €179k per year, alive 224x longer than intended, 16% chance of becoming business critical.