[KineticLensman]

> To get a decent result on any IT project you have to fix the organisation behind it before you even think about replicating that organisation digitally.

Exactly. I've seen this myself back in the day when I supported the MOD's system development (simulators for training, as it happens). As a techie, I was asked to develop some interoperability middleware between disparate systems. As my career matured, my focus changed to trying to get the systems to use common interfaces protocols / standards. Then I thought - why can't they have common requirements since may of them are doing very similar things, and drive tech commonality top-down. So I started working with the respective acquisition teams to get them to adopt common conventions. Then I started to question why they had disparate acquisition teams in the first place. This turned out to be because there were multiple customer project teams. Why was that? Because the different tribes in the army (infantry, armour, etc) didn't speak to each other at that level.

I eventually realised I was seeing a sort of example of Conway's Law [0], and was finally able to develop a proper briefing for a senior decision maker who was concerned about the technical / contractual complexity at one of his training schools (which had multiple different types of simulator, each with out own through-life support programme). This I believe finally led to some coherence-focussed reorganisations of the MOD teams involved, which was perhaps the most impactful thing I achieved in a couple of decades working in this space.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law