Stories of trivial facts usually know only by those who have technical expertise. These people were at the time needed but for one reason or another were not available (or not listened to?). Major consequences.
A short summary
Application procurement and implementation typical trouble
Insufficient technical expertise produced a delay of 24 months and 500k overbudget expenditure
for an application implementation that included complex config and data migration.
Client had very little technical expertise and was not aware of it as a major risk.
Supplier had very little technical expertise and communication and planning was poor
The animal farm without water
A simple but technically very intricate physical paradigm lead to major loss of farm stock.
Water distribution installation to the animal’s enclosures was designed to function in hydrostatic regime.
Cutting corners in execution lead to the installation functioning in hydrodynamic regime
but to function in a hydrodynamic regime, compensatory measures had to be in place.
50% of lifestock died because it was left without water (no compensatory measures over Christmas).
The pumps installed higher than 10m from water
A whole irrigation system covering hundreds of kilometers of canals and tens of thousands of hectars
wouldn’t work when it was all switched on because all or most pumps installed were too high from
the water’s surface. Either the designer or the builder forgot or didn’t know that
on earth, no pump can suck water from a depth more 10.3m (this is a physical limit).