staff not knowing what the fuck they want and constantly “amending” the scope of the work
… is pretty darn common across the board. I’ve never done any government contracting but I find it hard to imagine that it could be worse than the private sector.
Government is really bad at project managing and/or procuring software, because they treat software projects like a construction project of a building. A giant monolith that needs to be master planned from the beginning and with every possible bit of scope crammed in because you can’t change it later.
I think that’s more of a “huge organization” thing than specific to governments. Over my career, I found that the larger the company, the more like quicksand or a vat of molasses the projects were.
Manufacturing facility with fewer than a couple of hundred employees seemed like the sweet spot, especially when still run by the founders or taken over by long term employees. Multinational mining companies – not so much. :)
… is pretty darn common across the board. I’ve never done any government contracting but I find it hard to imagine that it could be worse than the private sector.
Government is really bad at project managing and/or procuring software, because they treat software projects like a construction project of a building. A giant monolith that needs to be master planned from the beginning and with every possible bit of scope crammed in because you can’t change it later.
I think that’s more of a “huge organization” thing than specific to governments. Over my career, I found that the larger the company, the more like quicksand or a vat of molasses the projects were.
Manufacturing facility with fewer than a couple of hundred employees seemed like the sweet spot, especially when still run by the founders or taken over by long term employees. Multinational mining companies – not so much. :)
Tech companies have no trouble building software products for the private sector compared to government