I work with a lot of technology teams, in a lot of different situations. I'm also a programmer. I think the tendency in these Monday-morning quarterback sessio

I work with a lot of technology teams, in a lot of different situations. I'm also a programmer. I think the tendency in these Monday-morning quarterback sessions is to blame the people or the tech. If they only used X,Y, and Z! people will say, or Why can't they find qualified people who can do this, it's not that hard! When that fails, we start blaming groups of people. Those damn contractors. Always screwing us over! or Dang government bureaucrats! Lazy bums! These patterns of analysis are almost always mistaken. You don't drop a billion bucks and get screwed because you hired dumb people, because you're lazy, or because they decided to use WhizBang 1.0 instead of 2.0 You get screwed because you have smart, motivated people working inside of a system of delivery which is hosed. Incentives are wrong, feedback loops are loose (or non-existent), and so on. So while this is a nice political topic, and sure to get everyone's emotions roiling, be aware that we see this same stuff all of the time. (I would make the case that government is far worse, for exactly the reasons I mentioned above, but I won't because it's only going to push many of your buttons). It's not the simple stuff that kills projects. It's certainly not tech. It's particular configurations of people that choose bad tech, or that refuse to change bad tech once it's identified. Most all of technology development problems boil down to social problems, not the other stuff. If you've got a good social structure with ten qualified people, you can rule the world. If you have a bad one with a thousand geniuses, you'll be lucky to get your shoes tied in the morning.