[OldGuyInTheClub]

Excellent and, to me, underappreciated points on HN. Now, expanding into the hardware world of A&D brings different levels of agony. If there's development risk, there's no good way to write a schedule that both accounts for it AND consistent with absolutely mandatory "Earned Value Management" where complex tasks have to be shredded into tiny 1-3 week chunks with metrics that the accounting team can track and report. If you need to fix a broken piece of equipment, if you need to buy a part, you're at the mercy of a procurement system that exists to survive audits and wants to know why the break or purchase wasn't in the plan. If the problem requires evaluating Plans A, B, and C, you have to pick one as the best, baseline, and execute it. Then if you need to consider the other two options that everyone knew up-front were possible, you get to explain why The One Chosen Plan didn't work. "You signed up for it."

The only way I've seen around it is a Risk/Opportunity Management system where risks/opportunities to whatever the baseline plan might be are enumerated, assessed, planned for, and maintained for when things go sideways or when there's a chance to save schedule and/or cost. But, that takes a VERY gifted _leader_ to run at the top level and those are rarer than hen's teeth. Ideally when a risk becomes a problem or an opportunity presents itself, the contingency plan is implemented. When it works, it is great and I've seen tough, ambiguous projects come in ahead of schedule and under budget. The common theme was one guy running all those projects and he's now retired. Usually the result is that the person reporting the problem gets stomped upon by a _manager_ who runs a cargo-cult process that s/he doesn't really understand.

Earned Value Management may be fine and dandy when development risk is done, the transition to manufacturing is complete, and the manufacturing process is relatively stable and the perturbations are small. Of course, that's when the contract SHOULD be Firm Fixed Price and not tracked by an army of accountants on both sides of the contract.