Well, for the sake of discussion, how does NASA assemble the team(s) that build their stuff? That's the highest profile, most ad-hoc programming gig I can think of.
I do know some NASA engineers, my impression was that teams get formed much like they do in a large corporation where a project manager seeks out various people in the organization with the skills needed and recruits them to be on the team.
In that case the team is pulled from existing employees, so there isn't an externalized negotiation that goes on, at least not directly.
From the disruption point of view you would need some sort of loose conglomerate which sort of re-defined 'agile' development, a company with a small cadre of full time 'producers' and 'project managers' but not engineers. They might come up with some sort of concept and then hire an 'architect' (the moral equivalent of the director) and then working with that person perhaps the 5 to 15 core engineers. Then a bunch of 'extras' in the form of new engineers who aren't yet 'stars.' Between the architect, the producer, and the product manager roles would be doled out and extras added as needed.
If you really did this like a Hollywood movie there would be a period of 'pre-production' where most of the overall design decisions would be made, the architect person would work with a designer ( the equivalent of a script writer in our analogy) who would layout the pieces and how they would fit together. Then you'd go into 'location' and spend 3 - 6 months of really long days getting the whole thing put together, and dump that over to QA / post production team who would go through and clean up the loose ends. Then blam you ship it, collect revenues and go to work on the next one.
Not surprisingly that is somewhat similar to the 'game studio' model. Games being programs that have a limited lifetime. Game programmers don't float from studio to studio though.
Fact is projects like that are pretty rare.