In brief, I had this project at work I was pretty excited about. It was to be an ASP.NET implementation of a solution for posting xml data to third-party background check services. I planned it out to be flexible and extendable across the entire product for all clients. It was to be my first .NET project for the company (in which I was eager to flex my atrophying C# muscles), as well as the first project for which I would have a degree of autonomy. However, due to the nature of how things work at my company (meaning that everybody is overworked), especially with regards to what we call “managing client expectations”, the project is now a “classic” ASP implementation of a custom solution for a single client and possibly something of a hack at that.
From what I understand, the U.S. space shuttle program has a similar history.