How to a Survive Mission Critical Systems Project Based on Public Tenders: Lessons Learned the Hard Way

In this paper, we outline the challenges we have encountered in mission critical system development projects based on public tendering processes and list reasons why the challenges we have faced are difficult to tackle. Furthermore, based on our experiences in the mission critical system provision domain, we see that the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model saves us from many of the shortcomings of the common RFQ process and helps us, at least partly, to tackle the encountered challenges.