I PM'd medium to large scale public sector (govt) apps development for nearly 20 years before retiring a few years back.
Some observations (and yes, I'm pretty opinionated about it):
RANT warning!
- Outsourcing to non-native-english-speaking resources (in my case for US mid-west user communities!) CAN work well, but takes significant overhead to make sure requirements and expectations of results and UI's are well communicated & understood, and then monitored closely to prevent it going off the rails...so, daily code reviews, etc etc.
- I
always took a 'just in time' development approach (what came to be called Agile)...it just works better, and keeps everyone on their toes
- In the 'early' days (mid-late 90s), for the most part, business and executive IT managers stayed out of the requirements and deliverables management 'game', which left a lot of UI and 'appropriateness' decisions up to the PMs.
For good PMs, this was wonderful; for lazy PMs, it was a guarantee of a 'failed' project.
Which then led, over the years, to 'middle & senior management' starting to meddle more and more with code decisions (esp wrt privacy: '
you mean we can track everything our employees are doing within our software?? Hmmmmm")
- So the trend I saw was (not unlike other business 'evolutions') the migration of decision control from those who where intimately involved with the details (and implementation choices & vagaries) to those who had other, 'bigger' considerations, not the least of which was career ambitions (which led to short term 'victory proclamations' vs. long term value to the enterprise, employees & customers).
- In short then, I kept seeing talented PMs being 'big-footed' by ambitious 'senior' managers who mostly wanted acclaim and immediate bonuses/promotions - at the cost of QA rigor (hello, Boeing?), innovation, quality/elegance, and code oversight/review/maintenance (
implement full regression testing? Nope, not enough 'value add')
- Apps Dev PMing went from a joyful, creative, team building, innovative, rewarding, customer-happy-making endeavor, to one in which your every action was being second-guessed by (usually, but not always!) less talented, less experienced 'managers' up the food chain, and so became an exercise in agony instead
So now we have web-apps that are intentionally designed/intended to mis-lead, or mis-direct the users (ex: how banking/credit card apps hide some of the most pertinent consumer info away buried under layers of sub-menus)....and inhale ALL browser actions into data repositories for further mass marketing/deceptions/influences - or worse. ("CitiBank" here will ensure I see lots of ads from them shortly
Not at all surprised at this 'take' on Boeing's apps dev decisions - not so much about outsourcing as such, but the failure for those 'managers' to adequately fund the proper oversight and review of the incoming code (and requirements statements).
We had an oft quoted saying that sadly applies: "funding for serious risk mitigation only comes with huge death or dollar events" - usually after the fact.