Thread drift, but I found Dilbert cartoons a great sanity saver during my time at the MOD. Each of these examples below were personified in at lease one Dilbert cartoon.
https://dilbert.com/
1. Submitted a business case for a change to a local IT system,which we had trialed and worked. The civil servant accountant's response was "This obviously works in practice, but does not meet our theoretical thresholds and must be declined. "
2. As SO2, MOD Customer 2, submitted a user requirement for a replacement classified IT system. Shabbywood IPT Team leader employs top rate consultant to determine Customer requirement, I was Interviewed by said Shabbywood 'consultant' who submitted my original requirement document with different logo, headers and footers but at an additional cost of £25,000 for his time (2 hours at most!).
3. Asked contractor for interconnecting linkage from one system to another and was told MOD would need to 'pull out the cheque-book', as this would need research, development and implementation. Contractor then shown original system contract which stated that their system should have a built in ability to connect with the IT system I wanted to connect to in the following 2 years. connection subsequently made in 2 days at no cost.
Sometimes, it is the contractor that milks the system assuming the requester has no idea and will agree to anything they say. It is not always the Services that changes the requirement and has to fend off stupid questions such as "do you want a 10 millisecond response, 100 millisecond response or a 1 second response when you switch the system on?" The difference in cost between 10 milliseconds and 1 second was immense. IT designers tend to try and use microscopic techniques to answer a requirement where a hand-held magnifying glass is more than accurate enough.