[kabes]

I've been involved in some big public sector projects and it indeed went like this, but I'd say most of the blame was on the government.

The tender requirements were written by a general tender-writing team of the government.

We only got to meet the actual users of the software-to-build after we'd won the tender. Apparently what was in the tender was a complete mismatch with what the actual users wanted (as far as they actually knew what they wanted).

What the users wanted didn't matter, because payment was based on checking off all tender requirements. Oh, one of the tender requirements was "all business logic needs to be configurable by the users" and more gems like that.