The Management Assistant built yet another project tracker

“It's basically a spreadsheet with buttons.”— Miriam, The Management Assistant

Reason:

Mainly because two teams disagreed about a column name for 6 weeks. Renamed twice to avoid attention.

Built by:

Miriam, someone from Procurement

Build time:

7 evenings

Built with:

Power Apps, licensed to one employee

Database:

the production database, directly, with write access

Authentication:

a URL 72 characters long, which counts as security

Deployment:

on a Raspberry Pi in the server room

Responsible:

a shared mailbox nobody reads

Documentation:

a diagram on a whiteboard, photographed, then deleted

Security situation:

it was reviewed once, by Miriam, who built it

Future disaster:

It will be presented at a conference as a success story.

Age: 340 days · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago · original builder left 130 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: 2 accidental connections, direct production access, €57k per year.