I've always been curious about what the bureaucracy is actually doing that takes all this time. I would love to see an hour-by-hour breakdown. When my county says I need a permit to install a water heater or whatever, and that permit (a piece of paper, just to remind everyone) is going to take 6 months to make, I would LOVE to have a full work breakdown showing why this takes 6 months. What people are doing what actions at what times, where the critical path of typing this piece of paper ends in 6 months? I would love to know why it takes decades to build 5 miles of train tracks. What people are doing what actual activities in what order that adds up to 10+ years?
When the execs at your software company asks you to explain a 3 week estimate to build a feature, you can sit down with your project manager, and build a GANNT chart or whatever, showing engineer A and engineer B doing design work for 1 week, implementation for another week, and testing the third week. In more detail, you could break down every team member's time spent by the hour actually writing docs, typing in code, waiting for it to compile, organizing field testing, and so on, and you can show exactly what physical activities result in the 3 week estimate.
I suspect if government agencies (or big companies) were required to produce an hour-by-hour breakdown of what individual people physically did through a project, you'd see a lot of "blocked on other team A finishing project B" or "waiting for executive Y to sign document Z" and also a lot of "picking my nose or playing golf, not doing my job."
When the execs at your software company asks you to explain a 3 week estimate to build a feature, you can sit down with your project manager, and build a GANNT chart or whatever, showing engineer A and engineer B doing design work for 1 week, implementation for another week, and testing the third week. In more detail, you could break down every team member's time spent by the hour actually writing docs, typing in code, waiting for it to compile, organizing field testing, and so on, and you can show exactly what physical activities result in the 3 week estimate.
I suspect if government agencies (or big companies) were required to produce an hour-by-hour breakdown of what individual people physically did through a project, you'd see a lot of "blocked on other team A finishing project B" or "waiting for executive Y to sign document Z" and also a lot of "picking my nose or playing golf, not doing my job."