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What I see at consulting clients is a frequent quote in IT magazines, white papers:

“projects are canceled just because we don’t have the
skill set internally,” says its director of operations.

“That’s going to affect the business, because the business folks are saying that they have a bright idea and they want to make it happen. It’s frustrating, because things are canceled or put on hold and it takes us longer to come to market with products or services or ways of supporting our customers.”

An IT shop has budget for 3 projects. Each project manager tries to staff-up. Each only partially succeeds. So one project is killed. One project is offshored. The surviving project then gets the onshore manpower of the other two projects (including a mix of citizens, legal and illegal immigrants). I’ve been brought in as a consultant for projects where I walk in the door for my first day and discover I’m working for a different manager and/or different project than I was interviewed and contracted for. I see it with my co-workers both employees and consultants. They think their going to be working on X but end up working on Y.

When I was at PacBell, I essentially had my own little "Bellcore" going in San Diego. There were many high risk, high reward, short fuse tasks that Bellcore simply couldn't accommodate. Their organizational inertia couldn't get the first meeting scheduled in the time I could completely solve the problem. Over a 6 year period, I returned $6 in expense savings for every $1 spent on my activities. It was lots of fun...until PacBell adopted the public company/focus on next quarter attitude. That resulted in early retirement of 6,000 employees in Dec 1991. I left with mixed emotions. I loved what I was doing, but realized that those days were over. The new crew at the executive level was driven only by next quarter's results. Over 360 major IT projects went in the trash can. Attempts to outsource them were mostly met with failure as the necessary expertise and corporate memory went out the door in Dec 1991.

It's sad to see your quotes. Especially given my prior history. It's also frustrating to be "managed" by people who don't have a clue about managing technical projects. They don't understand that the staff needs to eat even in lean times. When they finally get around to funding tasks, all the expertise has hit the bricks for any means of keeping food on the table. They have money and no staff to do the job.