Jim
I do not claim to know too much about EFA contracting. When they were recruiting, I stayed well away because they were one of the first teams to acknowledge (to be fair to them) that MoD no longer wanted technical project managers. (Clearly there were exceptions; I was interviewed by an EFA structural engineer on a promotion board in 1992). They employed a raft of consultants who took them to the cleaners. Sometimes your outlook is tainted by first impressions. In 1996 all aircraft offices at AbbeyWood were invited to a seminar run by EFA, to announce a major new phenomenon. Electronic Component Obsolescence. Their team leader on the subject was some professor they'd hired. He rambled on for an hour or so and then asked for questions, but admitted he may not be able to answer as so little was known. I tabled MoD's mandated regulations on the subject (2 Def Stans, both now cancelled without replacement) and recommended they ask the Chief Engineer to rescind his 1993 policy that obsolescence shall NOT be addressed. No more seminars. At least, none we were invited to.
Managing Obsolescence is one of the 17 core components of Maintaining the Build Standard, which is what you do when the design is under your control. The output of the process is the Safety Case, based on that maintained standard. If you get even one of the components wrong, it tells you something far worse is wrong with the organisation as a whole. That the entire edifice is rocking. In 1992 the RAF Chief Engineer decreed Build Standards shall NOT be maintained. Therefore, regardless of the niceties of programme structure and contracting, the risk of something very serious going wrong is always high.