From here.
It’s not “insane.” And, in fact, 100 days seems like a short request.
In my Fortune 250, I recently spent 4 months asking for a change that took literally 30 seconds to do. I wasn’t confused. They eventually did exactly what I asked to be done. But the email chain eventually included 52 people, and required a meeting to finally get the people responsible for doing the thing to actually DO the thing.
This is a perfectly-predictable result of the 40-years-out-of-date “best practice” of how to do “IT,” driven by the accumulation of selfish motivations present in any large collection of people.
Internal “product managers” with zero technical ability make requests to outsourced “product managers” with zero technical ability, who relay the request to internal teams which take a month to figure out who has the very specific knowledge of how to, say, move login buttons around on web pages — and ONLY that specific knowledge — and then middle managers with no technical ability have to schedule that activity with the activities of all the other people who have one, very-specific thing they know how to do. And after it’s finally changed in dev, then it has to be pushed through QA, staging, and finally prod.
This is how Fortune 500 companies do “IT,” all day, every day, and the very same incentives that have led to this climate are present in government, just writ larger.