Field Service built a product catalogue that disagrees with the product catalogue

“The quarter ends Friday.”— Head of Operations

Reason:

Mainly because the spreadsheet has 234,200 rows and 36 tabs. With dark mode and no error handling.

Built by:

Petra, someone from Procurement

Build time:

2 evenings

Built with:

Airtable plus four Zapier zaps

Database:

the filesystem.

Authentication:

the read-only account can update records

Deployment:

on the marketing website's server, somehow

Responsible:

whoever answers the support email

Documentation:

a Word document called Suppliers.xlsx

Security situation:

the admin page is protected by not linking to it

Future disaster:

It will acquire its own workaround.

Age: 225 days · originally expected to last 14 days · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 27% chance of becoming business critical, €48k per year, alive 16x longer than intended.