I haven't been on projects of this size, but with many of our customers a big issue is that the decisions are taken by people sufficiently high up in the organization that they don't know what's really going on, and without including key resources from lower levels to provide that insight.
In my experience it only takes one or two levels to get to that point.
Regarding the insane requirements, it's also my experience that a lot of companies think they're snowflakes, thinking they do something really special, when they're really just doing what everyone else is. For historical reasons they ended up doing it this way instead of that way and now they'd rather have the world change around them than change their ways.
> haven't been on projects of this size, but with many of our customers a big issue is that the decisions are taken by people sufficiently high up in the organization that they don't know what's really going on, and without including key resources from lower levels to provide that insight.
This is my experience working in government IT. The people whose job it is to go to meetings and talk end up being the ones representing the businesses interest and the vendor ends up running circles around them because they aren't in any way qualified to talk about something technical.
several valid viewpoints in this thread, describing portions of a difficult-to-describe situation. The word "qualified" jumps out for me here.. It could mean things like "sufficient technical background" and "of sound mind and problem solving skills" .. but in the govt context, "qualified" means exactly "you have legal permission" .. this is one of the several places that these projects break down, exactly. Those in business and those delivering permits, over time, learn that permits can be used to make money, and control future money, not work. The permit process for qualification also works at the bidding stage, where new entries are required to have their high school gradepoint checked, and hundred page report(s) to show "context" for the bid, yet existing payment contracts continue on in zombie mode for huge values, on a regular basis. This is like the force of gravity for these deals.. both sides, govt and big business, want lots of cash flow and no end in sight.
> Regarding the insane requirements, it's also my experience that a lot of companies think they're snowflakes
At least with anything government, there is another problem: changing processes often requires a lot of work, which means explaining to (completely clueless) politicians why something is necessary, get cost approval for each change, convince majorities... it's easier to have an omnibus "migrate to newest version of XYZ" package and to spend the money on making the system operate according to your whims than to fix the underlying bullshit.
> The technical problem is wanting one end-all goto system instead of like 20 different utilities I guess.
At some point these systems have to share info, dump info somewhere (data lake, backups, whatever), and output info.
Inevitably there will be one or two systems that connect them.
Plus the overhead of dealing with 20+ different vendors, systems, updates, vulnerabilities, interconnections, etc. is a nightmare. There is a point where a "single source of truth" is too much effort and too expensive, but a clusterufck of different systems is not a great solution.
The technical problem is wanting one end-all goto system instead of like 20 different utilities I guess.