In my common role as a "fixer", someone called in or hired to rescue a failing project, one lesson I learned the hard way was to make sure the organization hadn

In my common role as a "fixer", someone called in or hired to rescue a failing project, one lesson I learned the hard way was to make sure the organization hadn't kept the person responsible for the failure on the same team, generally with a demotion. He would invariably continue to mess up the project; very possibly unconsciously, I figured one reason was that only continued project failure would validate his prior failure. That, and just plain incompetence, e.g. back in the bad old days of 8088 IBM PCs, when people frequently programmed in C, it wasn't safe to hand such a person the responsibility of error reporting code, which could easily crash the whole application (real example).