Camlobe, To the casual observer the E-3D is little more than an off the shelf product with different engines. How far, within the bounds of public knowledge, is this from the truth?
The fact that it was only three years from order placement to aircraft delivery presumably meant that most decisions would have been taken within one tour of any particular RAF project officer post. Was this a significant contributor to its success?
ORAC wrote,
If you're a smart PM, at that stage you move onto a new start up programme for "career development" and leave the minor clean up problems to your junior successor.
Guess what happens.......
That certainly rings true. I have vivid memories of asking a programme director where the time for re-testing failed first articles was in her plan; only to be told, 'There won't be any failures, we don't have time for failures'. Strangely enough she left for an 'opportunity too good to miss', a few weeks before testing started.
KenV, From the projects you were closest to, can you recall anything which stood out from the early stages of the most successful ones?
Flaptrack wrote,
I was heavily involved as a member of the design team with two of those projects you quote. In both cases there was a massive and fundamental underestimation of the time, effort and cost involved in delivering the project, which was the main reason they ran badly late.
Was that because the experts in their fields underestimated from the beginning, or because the programme managers pushed them into corners to give unrealistic timescales and budgets, as, 'The customer won't like the original figures'?