> That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them. Whenever taxpayer money changes hands it is very political. You elude to that a

> That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them. Whenever taxpayer money changes hands it is very political. You elude to that a little bit in another paragraph, but governments can't just go out and buy things - their decisions will be held responsible politically so everything has do be done by the book. If someone goes off the rails, it potentially represents favoritism and people will protest. I see a lot of this happen in some of the more local politics I am involved in rather than the more routine world of software procurement, but people in my hometown are getting into quite an uproar over the local government trying to give tax incentives to develop an empty lot that costs millions in municipal taxes for yearly upkeep and appraisal. This presents an inherent conflict of interest, because the RFP process is insane. Therefore there is always a compromise that needs to be made for government workers to investigate and decide on project requirements in a fluid manner, and the need to document those requirements, set them in stone, and allow bidders to respond to them in an impartial way. The compromise is that there is usually an RFI stage where the procurement officers are "gathering information" but that is where they are really deciding what they are going to buy before they formalize the RFP. I think this is fundamentally broken - we need to recognize that procurement involves some deferment to experts who know what they are doing, and we need to trust them to make good decisions about how to do their jobs and get the software they need. But there is still a huge skills gap in a lot of governments over technology expertise, so the more a beaurocracy leans on responses to prescribe solutions, the slower this will be solved. > We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. Idk about your personal situation, but a lot of these times when you look at the RFP, there is a usually a clause to provide documentation, and training, and helpdesk support in perpetuity. Consulting and contract work is a field unto itself, and the big players are big precisely because they can organize large multiyear projects that will fulfill these requirements that cannot fail. I help run a partnership program at a software vendor, and we tell the smaller companies the same thing - don't market yourself to the government, market yourself to the consulting companies because that is who will be paying you at the end of the day.