Results vs. Methodology

Sometimes it is a story that strikes a chord and makes me write one of these notes.  Sometimes it is an ad on tv.  In this case it is a newsletter from Bruce Schneier, the Chief Security Technology Officer of BT.  He said, that governments should:

...legislate results and not methodologies.

That immediately showed up on my internal radar screen.  While his examples were with regard to things like legislating securing personal data, but not legislating which technologies to use.  Using my own quirky logic I equated this to:

...contract for the end result of the project, not how the project is going to get there ...

When a company puts out an RFP for a piece of work, they routinely say that the winner must "... follow all standards and processes currently in place or that may be put in place during the course of the project...".  We've all seen these as they are not specific to government.  But is it the right thing to do?  Let me go out on a limb and say "no".

In the long run, does it matter if the project team has detailed requirements tracing from the initial conceptual design stage straight through to production?  If you had two projects that delivered the same end result, does it really matter which route they took to get there?  If there are certain deliverables that you want then specify those deliverables in the contract.  Don't specify how you want them created, just that you want them created.

Coming from a programmer background and having been introduced to one of the most document oriented methodologies in existence - Method/1 - I've seen both sides of the coin.  Method/1 was created, to be honest, to minimize liability should the client ever decide to sue.  Dozens, hundreds, thousands of documents are routinely created so that an audit trail could be created in the event that a law suit was launched.  Method/1 was created by auditors, for software development, to be used in the event of a law suit.  Not exactly a glowing endorsement of a methodology.

Other methodologies are created for other purposes, but what it really comes down to is results.  You have certain expectation of results.  And whether the application was written people in blue suits with a document laden process or by a long haired geek who wrote it between episodes of Death Note, it shouldn't really matter, as long as the results required are achieved.