I have limited experience of government IT contracts but we did have two in my area, both motoring related actually. I leave you to speculate. While all customers can be a pain at time, government agencies excel at it. There is frequent change of management. The new guy always wants to throw his weight around. Everything has to stop and be justified (again) to him. Unfortunately my management usually caved in to all of this, with the remarkable result that, so far as I know, we made very little profit on such contracts. But we kept going after them, then got kicked because profitability was low or non existent.
On one occasion we were expected to provide details of every patch included in a patch set, what it did, what it superseded, what the superseded ones did etc etc etc. Many trees worth. What was he going to do with this information? Was he qualified to understand it? He was just throwing his weight about. We just stopped applying patches becasue the work would have been impossible.
Everything gets tailored to the point where it cannot be upgraded and you have a chain of dependencies such that the application is modded such that it depends upon features in the database & os which possibly work differently in later versions. You cannot upgrade the application becasue of the cost of re-working the tailoring which means that you cannot upgrade the db, nor the os which ultimately measn that you cannot upgrade the hardware. It doesn't take very many years before the whole thing is out of support by the various vendors and when something goes wrong you're somewhere without a paddle. Then the foolish stamp their feet and say "but they must!!".
I'm glad I'm out of it.
John
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