> So they negotiate contracts for this sort of work with really large, established consulting firms like the Big 4 and include all sorts of requirements and checkpoints and little details that they think are protecting themselves and would drive the average dev shop batty
To be fair to the bureaucrats involved in a specific project, this approach, including specific staging of particular waterfall-style deliverables (with more complex checkpointing and midproject external reporting and oversight required the larger the project and sometimes on other bases, such as particular outside-of-the-agency, e.g. federal, funding streams) is often mandated by statewide contracting rules (a mixture of general and IT-specific mandates), not something that the bureaucrats directly involved in a particular project impose.
And while in many cases ill-advised and counterproductive, each of those rules is typically reactively developed in response to and as a means of mitigating repetition of specific instances of negligent, incompetent, or outright corrupt contract administration that occurred in the past.
To be fair to the bureaucrats involved in a specific project, this approach, including specific staging of particular waterfall-style deliverables (with more complex checkpointing and midproject external reporting and oversight required the larger the project and sometimes on other bases, such as particular outside-of-the-agency, e.g. federal, funding streams) is often mandated by statewide contracting rules (a mixture of general and IT-specific mandates), not something that the bureaucrats directly involved in a particular project impose.
And while in many cases ill-advised and counterproductive, each of those rules is typically reactively developed in response to and as a means of mitigating repetition of specific instances of negligent, incompetent, or outright corrupt contract administration that occurred in the past.