Undoubtedly, IBM is partially at fault. However, I strongly believe that a vast majority of the blame rests on the Canadian government's managers. My thinking comes from my experience working with government.
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I work for a contractor that does the software development work for a large government entity (albeit smaller than the entire federal government of Canada). And while I have some incredible horror stories to tell, the following is particularly bad:
One project was particularly bad. During the initial requirements discovery phase, it appeared like a simple CRUD app. So, my firm proposed an architecture that suited the requirements we found. However, when the government employees in charge of managing the contractors looked at it, they tacked on a few requirements and changed several requirements/fundamental assumptions. So my firm adjusted the proposal and resubmitted. The cycle repeated several times. The government managers really wanted this particular project out as quickly as possible, so my firm had started building some of the basic parts of the application (i.e. creating the database tables, importing the models/relationships into the code base, designing the UI, etc.) before the architecture was finalized.
After a month with 5 engineers working on the project full-time, the managers decided to completely change the requirements altogether. So, we had to throw away everything we had made to date. That month of thrown away work costed the government $100k+ and they have literally nothing to show for it.
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I work for a contractor that does the software development work for a large government entity (albeit smaller than the entire federal government of Canada). And while I have some incredible horror stories to tell, the following is particularly bad:
One project was particularly bad. During the initial requirements discovery phase, it appeared like a simple CRUD app. So, my firm proposed an architecture that suited the requirements we found. However, when the government employees in charge of managing the contractors looked at it, they tacked on a few requirements and changed several requirements/fundamental assumptions. So my firm adjusted the proposal and resubmitted. The cycle repeated several times. The government managers really wanted this particular project out as quickly as possible, so my firm had started building some of the basic parts of the application (i.e. creating the database tables, importing the models/relationships into the code base, designing the UI, etc.) before the architecture was finalized.
After a month with 5 engineers working on the project full-time, the managers decided to completely change the requirements altogether. So, we had to throw away everything we had made to date. That month of thrown away work costed the government $100k+ and they have literally nothing to show for it.