Nobody refused the app. They just drifted back to the spreadsheet, and now both have half the data

I checked the asset request list this morning the way other people check the weather. Four new requests this week. Three weeks ago it was eleven. The app has not broken once, which is somehow the most frustrating part.

At the eleven o'clock huddle I watched Dana update the old spreadsheet, the one I was supposed to have replaced in April. She was not being difficult. She had a request to log, the spreadsheet was already open, and the app means finding the link, waiting for it to load on her phone, and filling in a required field she finds pointless. Multiply that by a busy Tuesday and the spreadsheet wins every time.

The bit that actually scares me came at four, when my manager asked for a count of open requests for the quarterly review. The app says nine. The spreadsheet says six others. Two are duplicates, I think. I spent forty minutes reconciling two systems when the entire point of the app was to have one. I sent the number with a caveat and felt like a fraud.

The win today, if I am allowed one, is that Priya told me she actually prefers the app for approvals because she can see the history. So it is not hopeless. Some of it lands.

What I want is a way to find out why people drift back without making it an interrogation, fix the two or three real frictions, switch the spreadsheet off properly instead of leaving it whispering in the corner, and relaunch once, with the team rather than at them. If the app fails after that, fine, at least it failed on evidence. What I cannot keep doing is watching it die quietly while everyone tells me it is great.