After I moved from academia/gov't labs to private industry, I was absolutely flabbergasted at the waste. Many companies literally just buy whatever their vendor

After I moved from academia/gov't labs to private industry, I was absolutely flabbergasted at the waste. Many companies literally just buy whatever their vendors throw at them to solve a problem, and if a reasonably intelligent techie spent just an hour or two thinking through the problem, they'd realize that the solution was either far less complicated than the proposed kit or far more; either way, what's proposed is almost never right. Another thing I haven't seen much of is acceptance testing. This is actually more surprising to me than the reliance on vendors for problem solving. It's an absolute no-brainer to say "I have problem X, which will be solved by solution Y, and the success will be measured by the set of tests Z. Unless the above happens, we will not pay the bill and you will take the hardware back." The vendors looked at me like I was from Mars when I started suggesting these. I have not since complained about government waste in research computing budgets.