Procurement built a vendor onboarding portal

“We have a backup somewhere.”— Group Controller

Reason:

Allegedly because the workflow has 96 steps and nobody wants to open it. With 22 users and 65 feature requests.

Built by:

Elena, a product owner

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

Airtable plus four Zapier zaps

Database:

an API that returns CSV

Authentication:

IP allow-list containing 0.0.0.0/0

Deployment:

running on a server last patched 141 days ago

Responsible:

Regional Sales Lead, who calls it "the little tool"

Documentation:

a PDF exported from PowerPoint

Security situation:

backups use the same password as production

Future disaster:

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

Age: 107 days · originally expected to last 3 months · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 45 users, 30% chance of becoming business critical, alive 1x longer than intended.