Comment by to11mtm

I've seen both good and bad contractors in multiple industries.

When I worked in the HFC/Fiber plant design industry, the simple act of "Don't use the same boilerplate MSA for every type of vendor" and being more specific about project requirements in the RFP makes it very clear what is expected, and suddenly we'd get better bids, and would carefully review the bids to make sure that the response indicated they understood the work.

We also had our own 'internal' cost estimates (i.e. if we had the in house capacity, how long would it take to do and how much would it cost) which made it clear when a vendor was in over their head under-bidding just to get the work, which was never a good thing.

And, I've seen that done in the software industry as well, and it worked.

That said, the main 'extra' challenge in IT is that key is that many of the good players aren't going to be the ones beating down your door like the big 4 or a WITCH consultancy will.

But really at the end of the day, the problem is what often happens is that business-people who don't really know (or necessarily -care-) about specifics enough unfortunately are the people picking things like vendors.

And worse, sometimes they're the ones writing the spec and not letting engineers review it. [0]

[0] - This once led to an off-shore body shop getting a requirement along the lines of 'the stored procedures and SQL called should be configurable' and sure enough the web.config had ALL the SQL and stored procedures as XML elements, loaded from config just before the DB call, thing was a bitch to debug and their testing alone wreaked havoc on our dev DB.