Obsolete Specifications - Catch Them In Contract Review

that would follow under Project Management.

This is about IT, but an interesting tidbit about managing it projects is that almost 70% of the projects fails

.... because of issues like these, and these can be addressed in other industry

I thought that putting in obsolete and irrelevant specs that ultimately get ignored into things was the a standard way that most management decisions get made so that they themselves can get out of being responsible for the failed end results.

"Well of course the project to provide multi terabit per second internet to every home for less than $9.99 a year failed. I clearly specified that a 12AX7 vacuum tube would be used in the power supplies and clearly you can see someone changed that to a 2N2222 transistor in the finished product design.

It's not my mismanagement of 100's of millions of dollars and man hours of work that was focused on unrealistic goals and expectations for the project that caused it to fail. It's that vacuum tube to transistor spec change someone else made that caused it to fail."

That's what I know about how obsolete and irrelevant specs being placed in designs and management unaccountability work together.

If the obsolete Standards or Specifications are referred to on older DOD or military use drawings there is generally NO ONE willing to correct and update them. Even though the military have gotten out of issuing Mil Standards and have specifically issued a final Rev cancelling the Standards and state that "All future Acquisitions shall be covered by..." (read in the current ASTM or ASME oe AISI or AMS standard) there is always someone out there who will insist that the obsolete standard should be used instead. Bureaucracy...what a wonderful thing. Too bad it is deprived of decision makers by its intent to march mindlessly backward and forward in lockstep with mediocrity.

Very well stated Spinco.

Milo

Any good contract should list all the specifications used, plus their dates of applicability. I have been involved in military specifications for a long time and know what happens when the wrong specs are used. I would guess most commercial contracts are not as specific as military contracts, but I could be wrong. Many law suits have resulted in a wrong or outdated spec being used. Continuation of a contract that invokes the "latest" spec when an older spec had been previously used can invalidate the continuance contract, if the latest spec had not been included. People can assume that the latest spec should be used, but that is not always the case. One needs to be part lawyer to be able to review contracts.

I proposed, many years ago, that as we had electronic masters of our basic specifications⁽¹⁾, referenced standard specs could be hot linked to an electronic data base that was updated often, preferably whenever a bulletin arrived from an issuing authority.

(1) Project specs were the base specs modified to suit the project.