Many companies get into trouble believing that they can just install the software and throw in some data. Inevitably, the scope of the project grows and what was supposed to be a simple system ends up a confusing mess.
— Greg Moss, Working with Odoo 11, Chapter 2, section “Gathering requirements”
Very often we install a piece of software just for convenience. We don’t want something big that will take ages to learn, so we opt for the easier solution. Maybe we can have a student write a short script that does just what we want. Then we tell him “can you add this little feature?”, and one month later another little feature. Fast forward three years and you have a largish system that is a big mess, and your company depends on it, and it’s expensive to change.
Or maybe a long time in the past you started using Excel just in order to make it easier for you to create this 3×2 table. Do you know all the use cases of Excel in your company now? Do you even know all the use cases of Excel for you personally? It doesn’t hurt to use Excel—though many of its use cases are areas for automation improvement—because it’s cheap and Microsoft is supporting it. But when the same thing happens with a student’s script, or with some software you picked up with the short term in mind, just because it was the simplest one, things can go bad.