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“client is not allowed to see” lol yeah that is so removed from reality as to be laughable. If I told a client you can’t see what we have the client would reply

“client is not allowed to see” lol yeah that is so removed from reality as to be laughable. If I told a client you can’t see what we have the client would reply “ok, you can’t see a bank deposit until I get a demo of progress”.

detaro 6y ago
Presumably this is in a context where the money is paid out in a very small number of batches upon hitting milestones, and the majority upon finalizing. There it wouldn't suprise me to see a "progress only gets shown at the milestone dates/review meetings/..." (likely still a bad idea, unless you have some pathological politics at work at the client)
Jtsummers 6y ago
In the defense contracting (and much of government contracting) world the way things are paid out is on hitting milestones. Milestones are not, necessarily (in the best case they are), incremental releases that could possibly stand alone without much further development. https://acqnotes.com/acqnote/acquisitions/milestone-overview https://acqnotes.com/acqnote/acquisitions/milestone-overview This is literally the way the US DoD has done acquisition for decades. In the early phases there are often (but not always) multiple R&D efforts which are evaluated later (in the aircraft world think about the various X aircraft that compete to become the next fighter). But once it's selected, it's very waterfall-esque from within the context of the program office which encourages (but does not mandate) a waterfall approach from whoever is doing the work as well. They do periodic check-ins, but they're basically waiting for the entire thing to be produced before it can be evaluated properly. The checkins are just smaller milestones, again not necessarily increments which could standalone if the project were to stop there. And yes, US DoD does big bang testing at the end. They have test organizations which receive software/hardware systems (cyber-physical systems is a common phrasing for them) and evaluate them at the end of the development process. Ideally, of course, the development team is also doing testing. But even then, in software, they tend to do scattershot testing during development with one big bang test run at the end.

detaro 6y ago

Presumably this is in a context where the money is paid out in a very small number of batches upon hitting milestones, and the majority upon finalizing. There it wouldn't suprise me to see a "progress only gets shown at the milestone dates/review meetings/..." (likely still a bad idea, unless you have some pathological politics at work at the client)

Jtsummers 6y ago

In the defense contracting (and much of government contracting) world the way things are paid out is on hitting milestones. Milestones are not, necessarily (in the best case they are), incremental releases that could possibly stand alone without much further development. https://acqnotes.com/acqnote/acquisitions/milestone-overview https://acqnotes.com/acqnote/acquisitions/milestone-overview This is literally the way the US DoD has done acquisition for decades. In the early phases there are often (but not always) multiple R&D efforts which are evaluated later (in the aircraft world think about the various X aircraft that compete to become the next fighter). But once it's selected, it's very waterfall-esque from within the context of the program office which encourages (but does not mandate) a waterfall approach from whoever is doing the work as well. They do periodic check-ins, but they're basically waiting for the entire thing to be produced before it can be evaluated properly. The checkins are just smaller milestones, again not necessarily increments which could standalone if the project were to stop there. And yes, US DoD does big bang testing at the end. They have test organizations which receive software/hardware systems (cyber-physical systems is a common phrasing for them) and evaluate them at the end of the development process. Ideally, of course, the development team is also doing testing. But even then, in software, they tend to do scattershot testing during development with one big bang test run at the end.