The Role of the Architect and Politics

The architect should be involved as early as possible. And the architect should question the requirements very much. When a system gets developed and the project starts with no requirements, only weak requirements, i would actually expect the architect to do the requirements engineering. This is something that many architects, especially the more technical minds, o really like to do. It's also where i might want to throw in a small anecdote about the role of the architect and politics. We offered the project with about 12 million, and the customer accepted. And then, of course, we had roughly eight million overrun. Isn't there a term for that? A design to cost, or something like thats?