Having been in IT for over 20 years I have spent my time in the trenches as a developer and as a PM. Because everyone loves a train wreck I'd like to hear from the community about a project that they have either managed or worked on that went off the rails.<p>I am keeping this very general so as not to offend anyone. A client asked me to manage the migration of a low traffic web site that tracked historical sites from Heroku to what could be loosely described as a content management system. The existing site was a RoR, albeit it was on version 1 or 2, none the less it worked very well. I was even able to find the original developer because he left great comments in the code which included his contact information. He offered to rebuild the site using the latest version of RoR and add some additional functionality that the client wanted for a very reasonable price. If I recall correctly it would have been under $10k US.<p>My client refused and instead opted to spend 9x that trying to shoehorn this web site into a Swiss Army Knife of a system that was not designed to do anyone thing well. The developer of the system just kept adding functionality to it because in his words, "why should we do it in X when I can do it in my system". After spending untold hours and money on this project the web site was never migrated and the developer still pushes his snowflake as the cure all for any new initiatives.