> promised a yearly headcount increase of exactly 0

That's the silly thing that seems to cause so much trouble. The conversation should be about budget rather than headcount, and the department heads given flexibility on how to manage their budget. There probably is some reasonable amount of budget to bring consultants in for advice on industry practices, but as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, projects like these should generally be managed in-house, and used to build up organisational knowledge, which will be crucial for effective long-term maintenance.

On that note, one of the best uses I've seen of consulting companies, is to have them help define the hiring plan for implementing the project, and sit in on interview panels, to help put in-house leaders in the right mindset of how to assess the competencies that they themselves are lacking.

Opex vs capex budgets is the issue then. The finance people have too much power.

For the in-house experience, keeping a core focus is important for any business. “Are we a website company now?” isn’t something I want my government weather department asking. They’re always going to be worse than industry and one website company per gov department isn’t a slope I’d like to slip down.

Also, sometimes actually defining at the boundaries the problem helps to solve it ie when the internal team creates a spec doc for the ext dev team.

IMHO, the reason government projects end up like this is derisking, pearl clutching, being difficult pricks to deal with and then being uncompromising on process change.

All of the worst aspects you could hope to find in the enterprise at the same time, and then they have a monopoly on being the government.