Strongly agree. I used to work in the civil service and there are many good individuals but the management structure is poor (though I think generally very effective at line management) and plenty of duffers get promoted. Many ministers are really very mediocre.
Good ideas and techniques are very slowly adopted, but then things like Agile are cargo-culted in an inappropriate way. To be fair, plenty of tech firms do this.
Dominic Cummings has lots of interesting ideas on this on his Substack. When Truss’ mini budget nearly broke pension funds, he pointed out that not only No 10 not know how leveraged they were, but nobody seems to care that they didn’t know. Surely central government should be able to pull together all the data it gathers?
Unfortunately he turned out to be not very good at governing.