Government Procurement Issues

I’ve done a lot of work for multiple national governments on multiple projects. There are two facts that can be true at the same time:- The government often grotesquely overpays for mediocre product delivered by vendors without holding them accountable in a meaningful way- The government process drives up costs to an insane level independent of implementor good faith efforts and strongly selects for companies good at the process rather than executionThese are two different problems, and

I feel that one of the issues that's never talked about is how government contracts are awarded. 'Analysts' and 'Architect' prepare a document outlining the spec of the program. Once the document is out, every consulting firm is free to access it and place a bid on how much they would charge to implement what was outlined in the procurement document. The government is then forced to pick the lowest bidder. It doesn't matter if what's asked by the government doe

This isn't surprising. I've done work in the federal government. Recently we built some products that did more, looked better and cost far less ($200k) than the other big name consultants. Our risk for further funding is that it didn't cost enough although most people love what we've done. The federal government IT market works on a contracting model, which means the people working under the system do things at a minimum OR do things to ensure that they'll receive further funding down the li

Sounds like a standard run-of-the-mill Government contract job to me. It's a known fact getting a Government contract is like winning the lottery for a lot of businesses. Ramp up your usual price by 1000%, take twice as long as you should and when SHTH proclaim the problem is a lot more complex and bigger than you thought and all is forgiven. Having said that, not all contractors deliberately waste money and drag out projects, but it is a known aspect of contract work. Whether or not that i

Sounds like a problem with contract selection, honestly. Maybe use an independent [agnostic] party to select vendors for major government contracts?

This is the US government, which generally procures according to the lowest bidder. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is business as usual.

This is fairly standard, sadly, and is why Government struggles to deliver, especially on IT and similar "intangibles" type contracts.The same issues happen in any other procurement activity that is required to rigorously follow a specific process due to spending public money, or bill-payer money of a regulated monopoly etc.In short, you need large numbers of people involved to avoid "corruption" (irrespective of the actual level of such risk), and this means you end up

What seems to be missing (correct me if I'm wrong) is bad incentives. Software projects in government tend to be assigned by two ways:1) via tenders, where it's a race to the price bottom, and the vendors charge massive sums for change requests or simply to fix what should have worked in the first place, but the government must pay additional money in order to not have wasted the entire sum already spent2) tenders with specs that are customized so only a select few (or one!) vend

This is the most obvious reason for why government procurement and contracting costs are so high.US/Canada governments have simply dissolved all in house experience. Which means they have no competent and experienced people who can actually evaluate contract bids. But further, they don't have people in-house with either the experience, competence, or power to make agreed upon changes to contracts on the fly.And because the contracts are so set in stone, that means even if all the

It's a combined issue: the big players have perfected the "malevolent genie" process: bid low, then take every requirement and find the way to extract the most billable hours and change requests from it.On the government side, many of them realize they're playing a losing game, but they don't have the resources to change the system, and it's not a priority for people to get elected, so congress doesn't step in. (And would they know enough to do so?)