Digital Transformation built an Excel replacement that everyone immediately exports back to Excel

“Nobody would want this data.”— Marketing Manager

Reason:

Allegedly because Invoices_Q3_final_new.xlsx finally crashed at 16:16. With 1045 users and 66 feature requests.

Built by:

Sofia, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

an Electron app, for a form

Database:

one table with 257 columns

Authentication:

the incident response plan is "call personName"

Deployment:

running on a server nobody remembers provisioning

Responsible:

a project group that technically no longer exists

Documentation:

an Excel tab called Instructions

Security situation:

the admin page is protected by not linking to it

Future disaster:

It will receive an innovation award.

Age: 5.4 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 3 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 473 users, alive 94x longer than intended, 27% chance of becoming business critical.