Finance built an onboarding checklist tool

“It only has admin access because read-only didn't work.”— Marco, Finance

Reason:

Honestly? Because it was faster to build it than to explain it to IT Service Desk. With a roadmap in the README, last touched 11 days ago.

Built by:

Marco, an analyst

Build time:

8 minutes

Built with:

a Notion database with automations

Database:

three databases, each claiming to be the source of truth

Authentication:

the production token is in a Jira ticket

Deployment:

deployed from a branch called test

Responsible:

Chen, who has never seen the source code

Documentation:

a photographed whiteboard from a workshop

Security situation:

production secrets are in a Slack message

Future disaster:

It will outlive two reorganisations.

Age: 4.0 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 4 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 420 days ago · original builder left 1377 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 65% chance of becoming business critical, alive 105x longer than intended, the builder has left.