The Cost of Convenience

They chose the easy path at every fork.

When the integration was too complex, they used a manual workaround. When the workaround got tedious, they hired a coordinator to manage it. When the coordinator got overwhelmed, they hired a second one. When the two coordinators disagreed on the process, they created a weekly sync meeting to align.

Eighteen months later, the "easy" path had produced two full-time roles, a recurring meeting, a shared spreadsheet with 47 tabs, and a Slack channel with 600 unread messages.

The original integration would have cost $30,000 and taken six weeks.

The convenience path was costing $185,000 a year and had no end date.

The Redemption

The new ops lead saw it on her second day. Not because she was smarter than anyone else -- but because she was the only person in the room without muscle memory. She didn't know the workaround, so she asked why the system didn't just do it.

Nobody had a good answer.

It took four weeks to build what should have been built eighteen months earlier. The two coordinators were reassigned to work that actually needed human judgment. The spreadsheet was archived. The Slack channel went quiet.

Sometimes the most expensive decision an organization makes is the one that felt easiest at the time.