Bulldozer00's Blog

If ur customer *requires* formal waterfall events like “Sys Reqs Review”, “Prelim Design Review”, “Critical Design Review”, gotta do them.

— Tony DaSilva (@Bulldozer0) March 30, 2014

The customers of all the big government-financed sensor system programs I’ve ever worked on have required the aforementioned, waterfall, dog-and-pony shows as part of their well-entrenched acquisition process. Even prior to commencing a waterfall death march, as part of the pre-win bidding process, customers also (still) require contractors to provide detailed schedule and cost commitments in their proposal submissions – right down to the CSCI level of granularity.

If you think it’s tough to get your internal executive customers to wholeheartedly embrace an “agile adoption” or “no estimates” initiative, try to wrap your mind around the cosmic difficulty of doing the same to a large, fragmented, distributed authority, external acquisition machine whose cogs are fine-tuned to: cover their ass, defend their turf, and doggedly fight to keep the extant process that justifies their worth in place. Good luck with that.