All looking up in the land of the free

[Suff]

We need to watch our blood pressure...

[cromwell]

Don't even BEGIN to talk to me about IT waste in Government.....

I'll stay off the well known ones Suff, and just give you a regional example..
IT manager wants vanity project to impress his bosses; promises them that it will be delivered on date X. Then realises he needs more people. So then he has to get permission to advertise for the new posts, because there is officially a recruitment freeze. Then they actually have to advertise the posts; and all the time the clock is ticking, and the deadline ain't moving...
So from a project timescale of maybe ten or eleven months to deliver the new application you are down to less than three before you can get the new staff on board. The application has to be purchased, installed on the hardware, the licences have to be sorted, you have to test and rollout on thousands of devices.
How do we think this might end?!

[Suff]

Sadly Cromwell, this is not just the premise of the civil service. However let me give you the business ending.

In business it will be recognised that there must be some gain from the money put in. So they move the time line and deploy late.

In the civil service, they will melt down in a huge blamefest. PM will insist that all procedures were followed to the letter. Resourcing will be blamed. Everything will be lost and they will move on to the next disaster. Nothing will be learned. Procedures and methodology will not change. Waste will continue.

This is the difference between government and private. Government does not have to succeed, they can just keep on wasting money. There will always be more where it came from.

[cromwell]

they will move on to the next disaster. Nothing will be learned. Procedures and methodology will not change. Waste will continue.

True. When you have been in the game for a long while, you can see these things coming. People buying the wrong product for the wrong reason and throwing money and resources at the problem when the direness of their situation finally dawns.
Once though we did try to run a project like the private sector (sort of). The project manager was on a performance related bonus to get the application in on time.
The usual scanerio unrolled; which is basically mucking about during the early months of the project achieving virtually nothing until panic sets in and any sort of structured testing is abandoned in a mad rush to get the app out on time, whether it is ready or not! So it was thrown out with insufficient testing, whereupon it promptly fell over leading to months of fire fighting, leak plugging and massive user dissatisfaction. BUT the project manager got his bonus! We successfully managed to combine the worst of both worlds.

[Suff]

We successfully managed to combine the worst of both worlds.

Government service in a nutshell...