Finance built a churn predictor trained on 40 rows

“It's not customer-facing.”— Head of Operations

Reason:

Mainly because nobody could find the right SharePoint folder in 19 minutes of looking. With a settings page that does nothing.

Built by:

Katrin, a key account manager

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

a no-code builder on a personal account

Database:

Elasticsearch, now also storing the invoices

Authentication:

the API key has existed since the prototype

Deployment:

in a Docker container nobody can rebuild

Responsible:

a steering committee that has not met in 3 months

Documentation:

a Confluence page copied from another project

Security situation:

IT was informed. IT has chosen peace.

Future disaster:

It will discover the backups have never been restored.

Age: 3.2 years · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 3 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 19 days ago · original builder left 248 days ago

Rated common mostly because: €381k per year, alive 56x longer than intended, 2 departments depend on it.