Sales built an expense approval workflow

“Nobody outside the team uses it.”— Marketing Manager

Reason:

Because Budget2026_new.xlsx finally crashed at 08:05. Presented in a town hall as "innovation".

Built by:

Katrin, a working student

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

a Slack bot doing database writes

Database:

an SQLite file called data.db

Authentication:

SSO, but only for Olivier

Deployment:

on a VM created for a workshop in 2019

Responsible:

Katrin, a working student. Only Katrin.

Documentation:

a Loom video nobody can find

Security situation:

the data protection officer does not know it exists

Future disaster:

It will silently stop syncing and nobody will notice for 5 months.

Age: 1.4 years · originally expected to last 2 months · 2 owners so far · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 2 departments depend on it, alive 9x longer than intended, 1 users.