[beachy]

> You write good RFPs and hold feet to the fire and they will deliver.

That's the key bit though. Its not easy to write good RFPs. Unless done to an excruciating level of precision (which they very seldom are), you leave wiggle room which the vendor will naturally take advantage of when things get tough.

[Zigurd]

I've written RFP responses in the telecom industry. "Excruciating" is about right. Thing is, if you are not highly detailed you'll fall between the stools of waterfall and agile. It sounds like this project went astray that way. Not sufficiently spec'ed, everybody gets everything they want, and not agile. You cannot make a sensible kanban board out of change orders.

[Spooky23]

That is the face of the problem.

In the construction business, there’s no need to state that nails get hammered or screws turned, unless there is a very specific application. But they tend to structure projects in a way where there is an incentive for success and punishment for failure. That's not to say that it's perfect, but there are far more $10M+ failed IT projects than failed construction projects.

If you work in this industry, you've seen your share of IT vendors delivering barely literate offshore workers through 2-5 layers of contracting pimps. That simply doesn't happen with pipefitters and others.

In IT, the tenure of the CIO other senior leadership is often is lower than the vendor and the project. The incentive for the CIO is to listen to <insert vendor here> because they may communicate what is happening better AND they may want a job with the vendor later. Without the threat of reprisal, many organizations will make poor decisions (both vendor and customer).

[Bertio]

Not to mention government procurement processes do everything in their power to make it difficult to write a good RFP and the major players are highly skilled at responding to RFPs for the purpose of winning the bid, not necessarily to deliver on the RFP's requirements.

[Spooky23]

I've worked in government and commercial sectors. Big procurement organizations are a pain in any situation. Government adds some wackiness because of transparency and personal liability that procurement officers are living with.

But end of the day, if the people writing technical requirements have the time and know WTF they are talking about, it works. If you hire <vendor a> to write an RFP that <vendor b-y> responds to and <vendor z> evaluates, how could the result not be a shitshow? (Btw, that happened in a Fortune 500 org!)

[koffiezet]

I've seen multiple government projects where the RFP's were actually written by the company eventually winning the bid - what a surprise...