Re:CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abando...
by timmy-turner on Sunday January 31, 2021 @04:00AM
(#25977281)
Reading "Let me try to explain using analogies.", I was worried someone would come up with another car anology.
Seeing orgs as people with characters, oh my, my eyes are opened now. Sounds weird but it makes sense the few times that I have worked on contracted projects.
For me, an added complexity in gauging the other side of the contract is that their personality changes depending on the actual people that are involved. When some higher-ups join the project it in later stages, the personality may turns even more mental than it already is.
Organisations are like people. Their culture is like someone's personality. Dealing with easygoing people is much smoother than paranoid delusional people with OCD. In the same way, dealing with government agencies is difficult because their corporate culture -- their personality -- is not what most people would categorise as normal.
These deals aren't normal deals. They're the equivalent of specialist treatment for someone with mental problems.
Take for example an organisation like SpaceX: They simply do things. If some manager goes to Elon with a rational but inherently risky proposal, he'll weigh the risk and then more than likely give the goahead. Other companies have a lower risk appetite, but they will take occasional risks. Sometimes huge ones.
Large federal government organisations are the diametric opposite of this kind of agile, low-overhead, no-bullshit private company. Their appetite for risk is precisely zero. That's difficult for people to wrap their head around. It's like a superconductor. It's not just a "really good conductor". It's not a "little better than copper". No, it's something fundamentally different. This kind of zero tolerance squeezes out entire lines of thought, just like a superconductor expels a magnetic field.
Notice how in this article the blame is on Deloitte and the "problem" is that there was a failure. This isn't a fault, this is the system working precisely as designed. Nobody will get fired for picking Deloitte, their purpose all along was to take the blame for the low-low price of a mere $44M so that a government employee making $100K won't have to have a couple of uncomfortable meetings.
The problem isn't that there was a failure, that happens all the time with software projects. The problem is that risk in government agencies is managed by people with essentially infinite source of free money that they can draw down on in order to protect themselves.
If a magic genie gave you a million dollars every week to spend on your own safety with no strings attached, wouldn't you? Would you say "no"? Really?