I feel that one of the issues that's never talked about is how government contracts are awarded. 'Analysts' and 'Architect' prepare a document outlining the spec of the program. Once the document is out, every consulting firm is free to access it and place a bid on how much they would charge to implement what was outlined in the procurement document. The government is then forced to pick the lowest bidder. It doesn't matter if what's asked by the government doesn't make any sense, the engineers on the contractor's side are forbidden from contacting government employees (for anti-corruption reasons).
I've heard many stories where the contractor knew the job would have to be done twice the moment they read the procurement documents. But they couldn't voice their concerns. And if they suggested doing what they knew was the right thing that would have made them ineligible for the contract as it wasn't what was required. Future-proofing the bid or trying to deliver something closer to what they ended-up shipping was also not possible because this would have made them more expensive than the bidders following exactly the request. In the end they ended-up rewriting most of the code at their usual billing rate on top of the original fixed cost contract.
In the case of Phoenix, I've read a lot of media articles outlining how bad of a job IBM did but despite all this it seems the contract itself was never challenged in court. What I heard from internal sources is that IBM did ship correctly all what was asked for in the contract, it's just that the government workers drafting the requirements didn't understand their own payroll needs enough to properly articulate them.
Of course CBC, the state-funded media where everyone is on the government's payroll, won't outright blame their bosses. But they would get sued and lose pretty bad in court if they claimed the contractors didn't deliver what was in the contract. So you get articles with a weird spin where they try to blame the contractors without going too far and paint the government as a victim.
I've heard many stories where the contractor knew the job would have to be done twice the moment they read the procurement documents. But they couldn't voice their concerns. And if they suggested doing what they knew was the right thing that would have made them ineligible for the contract as it wasn't what was required. Future-proofing the bid or trying to deliver something closer to what they ended-up shipping was also not possible because this would have made them more expensive than the bidders following exactly the request. In the end they ended-up rewriting most of the code at their usual billing rate on top of the original fixed cost contract.
In the case of Phoenix, I've read a lot of media articles outlining how bad of a job IBM did but despite all this it seems the contract itself was never challenged in court. What I heard from internal sources is that IBM did ship correctly all what was asked for in the contract, it's just that the government workers drafting the requirements didn't understand their own payroll needs enough to properly articulate them.
Of course CBC, the state-funded media where everyone is on the government's payroll, won't outright blame their bosses. But they would get sued and lose pretty bad in court if they claimed the contractors didn't deliver what was in the contract. So you get articles with a weird spin where they try to blame the contractors without going too far and paint the government as a victim.