When internal tools is worth the effort

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Internal tools is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

When it is worth it

The spreadsheet everyone fears is a specification. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

How to decide

Time saved compounds every single week. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

What this looks like day to day

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about internal tools before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Internal tools rarely need to be beautiful, but they must be reliable — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.