> During COVID the government tried skipping those procurement rules in the interests of expediency. The result was a huge corruption scandal.
I don't think that this is the guaranteed outcome for all governments and situations.
In Latvia, the COVID-19 contract tracing application "Apturi Covid" wasn't developed with a bunch of buraucracy beforehand, but as a voluntary community effort between both different orgs and people. As a consequence, it was developed reasonably quickly, actually worked and was helpful (even if the user numbers weren't as great as expected, but that's besides the point): https://lv-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Apturi_Covid?...
I know this because I was a part of the developer team (the website in particular: https://apturicovid.lv/#en before handing it over to govt. once my participation was concluded) and it was actually encouraging to see how well professionals with a common goal can work together, as opposed to some of the less successful processes I've seen. In particular, our e-health platform was once of those serious government projects with lots of bureaucracy, yet still didn't work after many millions in investments: https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/zinu-analize/...
(I've mentioned this previously, but the point still stands and the contrast is very apparent)
I don't see why a slightly more streamlined, iterative and goal oriented process couldn't work for commercial software projects, even in the public sector. Of course, if the clients don't know what they want and change their requirements whenever new people come into the office (new management), no particular process is going to save you. Nor will you be successful when people quite frankly don't care about shipping software that works and instead of answering your questions just throw a PDF with 200 pages at you, that doesn't provide the actual answer either.