Our contractor didn't have enough brains assigned to the job, and then managed to distort the in-house folks enough to go along with ignoring most of the business rules ("well, give up that deadline, that event isn't gonna happen, tough luck") and ending up pushing out a great many of the really important business model requirements out into "extra" status that they weren't doing by go-live, and hooray, they insisted they'd get paid extra $$ for doing those necessary fixups, if they ever get around to fixing it. As a user, I find this system has been difficult, fragile, easily crashed, half as functional as the old system, and takes three times as long to do the same tasks. We've had to MacGyver all kinds of stuff to meet the standards mandated on us by law. (You'd be surprised how much you can pull out in searches if you just include consistent details on the filenames. User-level fixes FTW! Shouldn't have to be like that...)
And a lot of times we aren't getting it done by deadlines because we don't have enough people to do what it demands.
The promise that we'd only need a quarter of the people we used to, with this hot new system, is like one of those black humor jokes where somebody just says, "Number 52," and people laugh.
The really insulting thing about it is that the contractor must have known a good deal of this was going to happen when they were trotting us through football-style pep rally drills to get all those solemn faces all excited and happy (can you see my lobotomized smiley face here?) about making these changes.
Funny thing is, I believe it would have been less expensive and less work all round if they'd just...done the work. Hired enough programmer bodies and stayed within budget. Talked to us about what the details on those business plans are, and how they actually impact things we do.
And I still get that sour "Yes, Minister," face when people start with the pep rally efforts.
But hey, it went live on the date they wanted it to, press conference accomplished, everybody got paid.