At one of my first jobs, my employer had $1.2MM and 10 people budgeted full time for 2 years to build a project that would allow managers to make queries on a very large dataset.

I pored through the specs, talked to everyone who would use this, and realized all the queries could be calculated from a much smaller, summarized version of the data.

I wrote a script that would create an Excel PivotTable every month and send it to everyone who asked, solving the problem in a few weeks with a <500 lines of code. The execs decided it would not be worth spending an extra two years to get the exact same answers in a web UI.

Good times.