I have a similar war story, from a university. The portal where students see their grades had several full-time consultants working non-stop for a few months an

I have a similar war story, from a university. The portal where students see their grades had several full-time consultants working non-stop for a few months and wasn't gonna be ready on time. The interface was confusing, and different campi were different business entities legally, so students required multiple login sessions if they took courses on different buildings (they had to pick a campus at the login page). Teachers were about to be instructed to give grades to students via e-mail by the Dean. I then saw the one database table on the teacher's portal DB that contained all the grades and knocked off a new screen in 1-2 hours in an existing system I maintained. A single remote database query, an HTML table, good looking layout. It was easier to use, more secure (SSO and 2FA), more performant, better looking and better-isolated (no DB write access needed). The biggest hurdle was political, of course. I was probably too slow, to do it, if anything. But I was definitely 300x faster than the consultants.