Sounds silly? Maybe, maybe not. The first place company is hired to actually do the work. The second place company is to make sure that they do it right. Think of it as pair programming on a much larger scale. The second company has people in all the meetings. They are performing constant reviews of the other's work by making constant critique of the work done.
Following our programming example, the returns out way the costs and on average help to keep quality up with costs down. Hiring more people to do the work to keep overall costs down might be a bit counterintuitive, but it seems to work. And again like pp, the people who "drive" the work change, it's not always the same. So each party gets a chance to be the reviewers and doers in turn.
Maybe if the Canadian gov't would have followed a similar process, we might not be dealing with a $1 billion gun registry. How could they be over their budget by like 10x? I just can't figure out how hard it would be to do that app... how involved is putting down who owns what gun and the make etc? I can see that it would be hard to tie into all the other systems, but that's just insane.
Short answer: it's cheaper to have a proactive auditor rather than to have someone from the Auditor General's office to come in afterwards and go "yep, you sure wasted a lot of money..." It's better to plug the holes in a ship that it taking on water rather than watch it sink to wait to figure out where the best place to put the plugs would have been.
Listening to: Groove Armada - Chicago
The US DOD seems to have a pretty good idea. When you have one organization looking out for the mistakes of another, you're more likely to find problems before they ruin the whole project. People tend to gloss over their own mistakes much easier then others would.
ReplyDelete... and you can bet that competing companies would relish the chance to make their competitors look bad! hehe too fun
ReplyDeleteWell it makes sense that costs are kept down by having one company checking up on the other.
ReplyDeleteThis is basically the same principle as reducing costs by finding defects very early in your product life-cycle. Odds are if there are two set of 'eyes' looking over everything, the company actually doing the work will make sure they do it right the first time since they know company2 will call them on it and they'll look bad.