What kind of “red tape” causes it to take 4 months to move the position of a log in button on a web site?
The 4 months was probably cited because the team that develops the IRS homepage has a backlog of work. That work is prioritized by a Product Owner or Project Manager. Requests for changes on a major homepage like irs.gov are likely highly scrutinized through governance processes. NOTHING happens immediately in the software development life cycle (SDLC). Something new coming in goes to the bottom of the backlog by default unless otherwise escalated. This effort may very well have been sitting in the backlog awaiting grooming/refinement and capacity evaluations for the work to begin. This change was escalated to the absolute highest levels and was prioritized at the top of the backlog immediately, probably skipping the governance procedures. Believe there was more than 71 minutes spent from the request to pushing this change to the live servers. That 71 minutes was from when the developer got the direction to do it. This is what we call “swarming” in software development. Everyone involved focused on this one thing to get it live.
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In a word:
STUPIDITY!!!!
Reviews necessary to prevent malicious changes by bad actors.
Inertia in a well working system can be very good to prevent system instability.
Even something as mundane as this change can result in system crashes if someone makes a stupid error during its implementation.
I have no problem with the governments delay in this case.
The issue here would be the forces that caused the odd placement in the displacement in the first place.
Before he retired, my brother worked as a midlevel manager at the main IRS installation in Kansas City. Occasionally, he would show me a memo handed down to him.
Though I have experience as a CEO of several companies in my 40+ years of professional work, I’d never read such impenetrable, pithy gibberish that didn’t seem efficiently oriented toward solving any problem related to its ostensible subject.
My brother’s continuing good job reviews were—as always—based on his dealing properly with such memos. That is, breaking down such memos’ instructions for the supervisors below him. The work cut out for him in such memos was so convoluted that I’d have left his position years prior—if I had any other options that paid as well. But the IRS higher-ups seemingly wants such midlevel managers in the mold that my brother was forced into, who could digest gibberish from their bosses and pass the emanations onto underlings, such that they could pretend to do productive work.
Suffice to say, KC is in large part a solidly blue cesspool.