and that's why governments should hire software engineers that can be in the loop and understand not only the technical but the policy side. Hiring an army of contractors earning 300k/year to deliver "something" in the waterfall model is a recipe for disaster.
Have you actually tried what you are saying ? Because it's a nice idea just completely unrealistic.
Software engineers who are not just technical but SMEs as well as having excellent skills in stakeholder engagement are incredibly rare. And most of them know how good they are and are contracting at, you guessed it, around 300k/year. Talented engineers are usually quite savvy when it comes to money.
Also for most projects like this it is Waterfall for the overall project (Requirements, Design, Development, UAT, Production) and Agile for the Design/Development parts. It's really the only way since the client does Requirements/UAT/Production and the vendor does Design/Development.
This is what the US Digital Service is doing. Recruiting these folks /is/ damn hard, but one thing that helps is being able to offer the opportunity to make truly meaningful large-scale impacts. It's a pretty unique environment with some interesting challenges...
> Have you actually tried what you are saying ? Because it's a nice idea just completely unrealistic.
I've been in places where it's done. In fact, I've been involved for a long time in a public sector environment with three key systems, one of which is a central claims adjudication system, and two of which are accounting and tracking systems that interface with it, performing similar functions to each other but for two separate programs that share the adjudication system. Those three systems, for historical reasons, have three separate models:
The adjudication is state-owned (that is, the code belongs to the state) and operated, developed almost entirely by a team of contractors with some involvement by state programming staff and a state development lead and also tight integration state-staff IT team that does requirements analysis and acceptance testing and manages most of the interface with state business users.
One of the accounting/tracking systems is, and has been from the beginning, developed and maintained almost entirely in-house by state staff (and almost solely with programming staff.) Because of subsequent organizational consolidation, the state team working on this system overlaps the one working on the prior system.
The other is a vendor-maintained MOTS system, with state IT oversight.
Each has it's strengths and weaknesses, but the MOTS system is consistently the one that is the roadblock to adapting to changing business requirements, and both before and after consolidation the all-internal one was the one with the quickest best-case requirementd to delivery speed, and by far the least expensive for the value delivered.
One of the things people grossly underestimate when dealing with government is that nobody ever really has enough power to make unilateral decisions.
I'm not even putting the bar at a correct decision, simply A decision.
Just try terminating a person or a contract with the government. Good luck getting the 12 signatures you need.
Even IF IBM screwed up this badly, who with sufficient power in the government is going to sign off on the order to fire IBM? It's a small world, and if you piss off somebody more powerful than you, your position is toast.
The cardinal rule of bureaucracy is to never sign off on anything unless you absolutely have to.
