Not exactly this, but it reminds me of my first job. I used to work in finance, and I was given the task of automating cash flow reports that were sent out to hundreds of clients.

The problem was that they were made manually in Excel, and most of them were unique. So every couple years they’d get a bunch of smart people in a conference room, and tell them to figure out how to automate the cash flows. The first step was always to create a standard cash flow template, and convince everyone to adopt it.

Some users would adopt the new template, but most of them would say that the client didn’t like it, so they’d stop using it and the project would fall apart.

By the time I got there, there were still hundreds of unique cash flows, but then there were a few dozen that shared the same handful of templates, like a graveyard of failed attempts to automate this process.

I just made the output customizable. The reports looked the same as what the client was used to, but it saved hundreds of man hours for the users. A lot of people got laid off.