Capability Maturity vs. Work on Proposals

I've prepared this text to efficiently process to common currently occurring and related phenomena. The first is the amount of unpaid work I can put in a lead before I must have some payment if I have not decided to do the work on some other basis. I am just a single struggling worker so I am forced to spend no more time on a lead than a rational expectation of closing and completing a job indicates is justified. Necessarily there will be some failures and some potential good clients will be lost. I started my professional programming career as a junior employee of a conglomerate that was working as a subcontractor to IBM in the acquisition and award phase of a contract that spanned more than a year. I am risk averse and I also am loathe to perform work in this Era where one must work very fast in requirements analysis and design for nothing. This doesn't mean I won't do it, but the capital entity requesting such unpaid service must be such that I can be reasonably sanguine about the aforementioned expectation. The second is so-called Capability Maturity (CMM) and its antipattern CIMM , which has to do with the reliablity of estimates in CMM Level I situations. Of course the lack of adequate requirements and design is the penultimate root cause of failure in software development projects (the ultimate root being the universal antipattern Failure of Responsibility). These elements are seldom done well outside of very mature and well capitalized organizations and nonetheless work gets done. However there is huge waste