[maxxxxx]

From my experience it's mainly that governments don't have a lot of experts on staff so a lot of decision making gets outsourced too. I worked on a gov contract a long time ago and it was pretty obvious that there were several higher ups in government who added their own conflicting requirements to the list. Everybody in the trenches saw that they made things incredibly complex for no good reason but nobody pushed back. The main contractor was happy to sell many, many more hours and inside government there was nobody who had the ability to screen requirements for consistency and feasibility before giving them to the contractor.

It's like dealing with any other service business like contracts, lawyers, wedding photographers or others. If you don't give them clear guidance the result will most likely be an expensive disaster.

[mcv]

Another problem with governments is that they're made up of dozens or hundreds of different organisations, and they all make these mistakes on their own. Even if one organisation gets it right, other parts of the government don't benefit from that expertise.

I think governments should have a special organisation that just maintains the expertise for handling these sort of big projects all across the government.

[empath75]

You’d think so but then you just have one more organization that doesn’t share anything with anyone else.

[mcv]

That organisation would have as its only job to make sure all other government organisations get this right. It should be able to work when that's their only responsibility.