>Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we just said "that sucks" and required a full postmortem instead. I think this way of thinking is crucial.

>Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we just said "that sucks" and required a full postmortem instead. I think this way of thinking is crucial. Ultimately, these projects start to take this shape at conception... long before the failures are realized. The heads-i-win-tails-you lose games. The liability avoidance. The negotiation of guilt for the expected failures down the road. It's a similar game in the corporate world, like with enterprise software. Everyone knows that an ERP project will blow the budget and timeline. Lots of lawyerly hours are spent creating liability frameworks for it. The result is always ambiguous, pinning failures on specification failures, changing requirements or whatnot. Systems respond to incentives in many ways, but institutional (government, commercial, NGO, charity...) response to liability is rarely a positive sum game. Not saying I have the answers, just that the obvious ones have been tried and failed. This isn't a marginal issue. As it stands now, there is are huge categories if things we need and can't have... because the systems for getting them are horribly ineffective. If trains cost 5X what they could cost, we effectively can't have new public transport systems. That's not sustainable.