Who is asking the questions about the project? What kinds of questions do they ask?
Usually those asking the questions are a collection of horizontal and vertical layers of management relative to the various engineering groups.
The questions they are asking are usually:
How long is it going to take?
When is it going to be done?
How long would it take to add this feature?
usually followed by:
Shouldn't that take just a couple days?
What questions are not being asked? How about:
Do we have a clear idea of what the product should be?
What can I do (as a manager) to clear the way? ("move furniture", as Joel Spolsky says)
Do I (at a management level) understand the existing product, the current technology, the new product, the market, etc.?
The illustration above about using a personal credit card to expedite a Digi-Key order hit way too close to home, and it seems relatively common. To put some numbers on it, let's say an engineer with a burdened cost of $100,000 per year works on a project with an expected budget of $1,000,000. An order of $100 is necessary to move a key part of the design forward.
So suppose it's Wednesday the 1st at 5:30 PM and to expedite an issue you want to make a Next Day Digi-Key order for delivery on Thursday the 2nd. The boss left at 5:00 PM, and he as the one credit card for the group. So it's entered by 6:00 PM but it won't get processed anyway until the next day because Purchasing leaves at 4:00 PM. But then it doesn't get processed because the purchaser took Friday the 3rd off, so now it doesn't get ordered until Monday the 6th, but they did 3-day delivery instead of next day, making it arrive on Friday the 10th.
Did this save any money anywhere in the process? What is the value of expediting blocking processes like that? Would a $1000 credit card per engineer be worth while? The liability on a $1000 credit card is... $1000. With an engineer who is answerable to what is purchased, so ordering cookies or golf balls probably won't happen. What is the liability of a week of delay? $10,000?
Look at all the relative orders of magnitude here. The little tasks get in the way large responsibilities, like priority inversion in some embedded system.