A significant ethical concern involves pitch intermediaries charging fees to both the client and the winning agency. This "double dipping" creates a conflict of interest that can skew the selection process, undermining the goal of finding the best partner.

When a team presents a timeline that feels instinctively too long, trust that gut feeling. It likely signals an over-engineered solution. Complex systems never become simple; they only breed more complexity, causing timelines to expand endlessly. It's better to reset the team or the approach early on.

When a project stagnates, it's often because "everyone's accountable, which means no one's accountable." To combat this diffusion of responsibility, assign one "single-threaded owner" who is publicly responsible for reporting progress and triaging issues. This clarity, combined with assigning individual names to action items, fosters true ownership.

The primary cause of failure in engineering projects is not technical incompetence but a lack of visibility into budget, schedule, scope, and risk. Successful project execution hinges on addressing these core management areas before they derail the work.

In high-stakes projects like clinical trials, waiting for a scheduled weekly meeting can be an absurdly expensive convenience. Calculating and constantly referencing the 'cost of delay'—which can be millions per day—reframes the problem, creating the urgency needed to get an immediate decision instead of waiting.

Anduril advocates for performance-based contracts, a controversial model in government where payment is contingent on the product working. This forces internal accountability and aligns their interests with the customer's, contrasting with traditional cost-plus models that place all risk on the government.

Project delays aren't just about lost time; they generate tangible costs. Contractors must continue paying salaries for project managers, supervisors, and safety personnel who are assigned to the stalled project and cannot be reassigned, leading to significant 'indirect overhead' claims.

Government agencies without in-house technical expertise are at the mercy of contractors who inflate costs. Hiring even one skilled software engineer provides the capacity to call a vendor's bluff, potentially saving millions by demonstrating that a requested "million-dollar fix" is actually a 30-minute task.

The "cost-plus" regulatory model allows utilities to earn a guaranteed return on capital investments (CAPEX) but no margin on operational expenses (OPEX). This creates a powerful, often inefficient, incentive for utilities to solve every problem by building expensive new infrastructure, even when cheaper operational solutions exist.