As someone who still has the scars to show where the consultants tried to run me over, let me tell you how the game works from a consultants point of view.
Firstly, remember Civil servants are highly risk averse individuals. Initiative that somehow (rightly or wrongly) brings you into conflict with a Minister will truncate your career. That includes correcting the Minister's or your bosses mistakes.
So this is what happens.
1. It finally becomes bleeding obvious even to the tea lady that an information system is broken, kaput, finished, stalled, rusted out or whatever.
2. Consultants are hired to write a request for tender document that spells out the operational requirements of the new system in great detail. This takes two years and the specifications run to four or more volumes.
3. After a further years processing, a global consultant, called ****** wins the tender with an absurdly low bid and proceeds to start work. Twenty staff are immediately ensconced in your offices. A foot is permanently jammed in the door. No one wonders why the successful tenderer didn't ask very many questions about the system during the bidding process.
4. Simultaneously, each decison maker between the project manager and the Minister are provided with a suitably chosen partner in the said consulting firm. They proceed to "get close" to their particular quarry through some very expensive lunches, attendance in the corporate box at Wimbledon, the opera, whatever it takes to ingratiate themselves. These events are monthly "to discuss progress" is the usual pretext.
A variation of this is the "It is important for the project that you must attend the conference on (insert favourite technology) we are holding in New York next week". Since middle level managers rarely get to go anywhere, this sends them into orbit and they go running to their boss armed with this recommendation on ******* letterhead.
5. Three months into the project, the designated partner explains to the project manager that the specifications for the system seem a tad outmoded (by this time of course they are four years old) and variations will be required to cope with new (work practices/Taxation laws/ insert favourite reason). This will require the project manager to take decisions - which of course the project manager cannot do without wide consultation.
6. Three weeks later, the ****** partner arrives and points out that his staff have been waiting threee weeks doing nothing waiting for the project managers decision, and casually hands him an associated invoice for thirty thousand quid for the associated dead time, remarking casually that he had seen the Minister at the opera last night and told him how swimmingly well the project was running. he also usually asks for three other decisons to be made as well, often highly technical decisions that he knows that the project manager doesn't have a clue about. The project is now going in the direction that ****** wants it to go. It becomes obvious that the original system specification is now irrelevent. It is a dead document written four years ago that has no connection with todays reality. The project manager is now in uncharted territory with only **** to guide him.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 every few weeks. Repeat step 4 when the project managment structure changes as people sense what is going on and bail out.
8. Tell the Minister and senior managers at all levels that the new system isn't going to save any money without job redesign/business process analysis/ a new IT strategy/ architecture etc., and how sad it would be if the public found out about this. Thisd brings in another army of **** consultants in HR, business process redesign etc. etc. They of course also know how to repeats steps 4,5, 6, 7 and 8.
9. It usually takes about five years before the budget is consumed. These guys and girls can suck two hundred million pounds out of a Government department very very quickly.