California Cancels $208 Million IT Overhaul Halfway Through 185
g01d4 writes "According to the LA Times, 'California's computer problems, which have already cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, have mounted as state officials cut short work on a $208-million DMV technology overhaul that is only half done. The state has spent $135 million total on the overhaul so far. The state's contractor, HP Enterprise Services, has received nearly $50 million of the money spent on the project. Botello said the company will not receive the remaining $26 million in its contract. ... Last week, the controller's office fired the contractor responsible for a $371-million upgrade to the state's payroll system, citing a trial run filled with mishaps. More than $254 million has already been spent.' It's hard not to feel like the Tokyo man in the street watching the latest round of Godzilla the state vs. Rodan the big contractor."
Sadly (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is the state that has Silicon Valley...you would think there would be a lot of good expertise in the computing arena for the state to tap in to. However, in their defense, this happens constantly in the federal government too. So much money wasted...
Re:Sadly (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, this very scenario has happened a decade before [cnet.com], albet with Oracle instead of HP.
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Doesn't that make it IBMs turn next?
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Back in my day, EDS were the masters at cost overruns and delays on cost-plus government IT projects.
Re:Sadly (Score:4, Insightful)
Why finish a project someone is paying you for? Do enough (cheaply) to get 50% of the payout, get fired, form a new company and get hired again.
Re:Sadly (Score:4, Insightful)
you would think there would be a lot of good expertise in the computing arena for the state to tap in to.
Ahahaha, with our government? If they even had the slightest idea of how important it was to stay out of the fucking 1980's with IT equipment that serves critical functions for the state and its citizens, they wouldn't have waited for the problem to "cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars" to do anything about it.
If they can't get that much straight, how can they possibly hope to know what technical criterion to look for when hiring contractors?
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Re:Sadly (Score:5, Informative)
how important it was to stay out of the fucking 1980's with IT equipment that serves critical functions
Talk about blanket statements. I suspect that there is quite a bit of 1980s IT equipment in your life that you are not even aware of.
The problem is not what decade the equipment comes from, it is whether or not the equipment meets its requirements. If equipment from the 1980s is continuing to meet the requirements that governments face today, then there is no reason to spend enormous amounts of tax money to replace that equipment unless doing so will pay for itself before the next upgrade. Unfortunately, there are few cases where such upgrades actually do pay for themselves, so in terms of what is best to do with tax dollars, upgrading old equipment that continues to function as needed is questionable.
Now, if the equipment is not working, then it is time to replace it. The real problem is that government contracts are not typically given to companies deemed best for the job, and so these situations arise. Contracts are awarded to companies that bid low and to companies that are well-connected, even when better companies are available.
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how important it was to stay out of the fucking 1980's with IT equipment that serves critical functions
Talk about blanket statements. I suspect that there is quite a bit of 1980s IT equipment in your life that you are not even aware of.
Possibly, but I'm aware that I do use a lot of tech that wasn't invented within the past decade. My last post was ambiguously worded and I apologize, it would have been better to say "not stay in the 1980's". Even people who know nothing about IT understand it's a poor decision to just implement the infrastructure and call it a day. When you're doing something that affects the security of the personal information of millions of people, there's a lot to carefully consider. I've yet to see a politician in Ca
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So much money wasted...
It would be understandable if that were the case, but instances like these usually fall into the category of "systematically engineered to extract every last cent of tax dollars out of the project before shitcanning the whole works as an OOPS"
The only other explanation for such negligence and runaway overspending is sheer idiocy -- and I don't think people who get approved to spend that much money are all that stupid.
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I'm currently working on an IT project on one of the worse govt departments in my country. They have a reputation for horrible performance, both in their normal operations and in the IT department as well. They were officially reprimanded by the government accounting office a few years back for failure to control their own organisation. The project is a frigging mess, it's the worst project I've ever seen in a professional setting, even compared to municipal IT which is mainly "amateur time".
The main proble
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Nope, just standard practice here: Pay "reputable" consultants big bucks to fly in workers from the opposite coast every week. Not to mention the offshoring.
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Fallacy of Sunk Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad to see that they didn't fall prey too badly to the fallacy of sunk costs [wikipedia.org]. Too many places wouldn't realize they've already lost the money they threw at the project, and no amount of extra spending in the hopes that it will eventually succeed will get that back.
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I'm not glad to see that people can't see that big IT consulting corporations have all, without exception, degenerated into useless hulks that can't get anything done. Show me any large project that they undertake where the goals were completely met, and the user is happy. It's in the realm of fantasy, basically. Big IT consulting is basically a scam.
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Re:Fallacy of Sunk Costs (Score:4, Interesting)
Last year a well known IT architect wrote an article titled "The Failure bonus" where he describes how the system for government IT contracts is set up in such a way that failure is rewarded richly, but performing better than specs will lead to unemployment at a rapid pace. It's not that big IT consultants are incompetent, it is that they are very competent at following the money.
That said: big projects are inherently impossible to complete and everyone in IT knows it. Government knows it too, big projects should be cut down to manageable size or abandoned. Putting out contracts on a "cash on delivery" basis would probably make that a much more viable option for small firms.
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Yes, a reference please. Google did not help on this one.
So this upgrade (Score:2)
Went as well as the last?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Sounds familiar but on a smaller scale... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sounds familiar but on a smaller scale... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or that HP sucks as a software company.
Or maybe it turned out exactly the way they intended. I mean hey, HP made $50M on the deal.
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RTFA. The contract was awarded to EDS; EDS was a good integrator. Unfortunately, that was back in 2007, just before HP fucked up *backspacebackspacebackspace* bought EDS. (I was there.) HP's applied manufacturing-based practices to the service-based business...things like getting rid of headcount (in cases where those people are 100% dedicated and billable to an account, generating both revenue and profit while fulfilling contractual obligations). So, account after account is now complaining while the
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The "king is naked" kind of a moment is when you realize that a lot of those projects could be done in 2-3 years by a dedicated team of 30 people. We're talking about $15M in total personnel costs, assuming you pay $150k gross per person. I'd absolutely love to be in such a team and actually deliver something that makes some local government somewhere more efficient, and their employees happy with the tech. It can be done, just requires proper mindset. Of course the bureaucrats the world over will fuck it u
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I think that the OP's point was that these projects aren't actually
Would like to see this happen more (Score:5, Interesting)
We see this all the time in the military. A low estimate is given on a minimally speced out project. Then as the project money is spent, the agencies go back to the congress and ask for more money, saying we already spent this money, and it won' really work the way we need it to. Instead of firing the con artists, and suing the contractors, and accepting the money as lost, we fund it more thus encouraging the fraudulent behavior.
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Yeah, but those same companies are hire the politicans on their way out the door, sit them behind a desk and let them collect paychecks indefinitely.
It's a revolving door. And the middle class, the majority of the taxpayers, are the ones getting spun in circles and flung away.
obamacare is not contractor and it fixes a lot of (Score:3)
obamacare is not contractor and it fixes a lot of stuff.
Also the obamacare exchanges are like new stores with more choice then in the past.
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obamba care fixes nothing, and just injects more money into the positive feedback loop of rising insurance, healthcare, and big pharmy costs. what idiots our lawmakers were, to sign it without reading it or comphrehending it (to quote the lobotomite Pelosi "we have to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it!")
Nothing to see here... (Score:2)
Nothing to see here. No political corruption or fraud. Just move along people.
"The decision is a setback for the Department of Motor Vehicles, which has a history of such stumbles."
Oh you mean they've done this before? Well let's wait a few more months and then throw another few hundred million dollars at them. And of course a few million to our political and social friends.
"The DMV project began in 2006, according to the California Technology Agency. Instead of using 40-year-old, "dangerously antiquated te
Re:Nothing to see here... (Score:5, Insightful)
>"The DMV project began in 2006, according to the California Technology Agency. Instead of using 40-year-old, "dangerously antiquated technology," DMV staffers were supposed to get a modern, user-friendly system that minimized the risk of "catastrophic failure," according to a DMV report on the project."
This encapsulates solving multiple problems at the same time. This cannot be done. You update large systems by plotting a path through incremental improvements that get deployed, tested and fixed before the next increment, so that get you to where you need to be. It might not seem like the optimal path, but anything involving a switch over of technology, UI, back end, infastructure and buckets of code all at the same time is simply never going to work.
In the case of the DMV, it might involve unifying disjoint databases pair by pair until you have only one, while maintaining the same interface to the heterogeneous clients. Then one by one converting the heterogeneous clients to a standard back end interface. Then one by one adding the features of a client to the grand unified client and switching over that system, until the GUC has all the features for all the clients are new client. Then one by one, updating the organizational procedures to make them better, and updating the GUC while doing so. You can make these changes one by one. You can roll back one step if it doesn't work right the first time. You can measure progress by the number of working updates, not in how much less non-working the global-replace-systems is today.
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Exactly! Incremental improvement is where it's at. If your most pressing issue is antique hardware, then you only do what's necessary to get the system ported to current hardware. Run the mainframe code in an emulator if you must, but for the life of you don't redo it all from scratch while the customer is one breakdown away from a catastrophe. Once the first most pressing issue is addressed, you move on to the next one. And so on.
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I'm a contractor for a government agency that has implemented an entirely new system based on Siebel (yeah, that's right, 1999 called and wants their CRM back). The system has been "designed" (I use the word loosely) to replace several departments systems. It has, of course, been a disaster. On a technical level, Siebel sucks. It's back-end is convoluted and not well designed for massive customization. On the front end, the ActiveX controls it relies on only work perfectly in IE6, so it's compatibility mode
Yeehaw - dumpster BO-NAN-ZA! (Score:2)
A lot of DMV workers just got new tech for their homes!
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Since the project has been going on since 2006 the hardware is probably EOL (unless they did a tech refresh).
Um, math? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was going to use my mod points to mod up the first person who questioned the new math behind how a $208 million dollar project cancelled halfway through already cost $254 million dollars.
Alas, nobody had yet... and it's just about beer-o-clock here.
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Um, reading? (Score:2)
It didn't. $135 million dollars had been spent on it -- the $208 million number is in a different sentence, about a different $371 million project by a different state agency where the contractor was fired. Also note that "halfway through" doesn't mean that only half the allocated costs were consumed; indeed, costs out
Somethings wrong with this (Score:4, Interesting)
I smell something going on here. I'm thinking this may have been a bit too convenient.
contractors and sub contractors and lot's of overh (Score:2)
contractors and sub contractors and lot's of overhead and have lot's of layers from the guys on the ground to the guys on the back end.
Also some people temp worker drag stuff out so they keep getting a pay check.
Cost more in the long run... (Score:2)
This is California's way of creating jobs. There will be IT disaster, so California will have to hire IT staff to fix it. Not very economic, but at least we can create some useless jobs.
Irony (Score:5, Informative)
This is by far the best line of the article....
"Hewlett-Packard is now run by Meg Whitman, who during her failed campaign for governor in 2010 promised to save California money with better computer technology."
Why $208 million? (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, the system presumably has to handle about 30 million drivers and vehicle statistics, as well as other information such as traffic citations. I assume it's only accessed through a few hundred offices plus allow access to authorised systems (police etc) at any one time. Obviously it's got to be reasonably secure and perhaps operate at more than one site to cater for disaster recovery and redundancy. This is not beyond the capabilities of a few large servers to handle (I presume that cloud storage may be out due to security issues). Such a system could supply the information to Windows/Unix or even phone app clients. I assume driving licenses and vehicle ownership records have to be printed and sent from an office somewhere.
What else is in the scope of the project? Why does it cost several hundred million bucks to develop a new system? I can understand perhaps 10 million to develop and install. The biggest problem I can see is porting the data from the "40 year old antiquated system" to the new one. Someone must be able to explain where the extra £198 million has to go, apart from the contractors pockets.
Paper. Lots of Paper. (Score:5, Informative)
Having worked on govt projects before, it's all spent on :
a) Management. Lots of it. About 5 times as many managers/sub-contract managers/advisors etc than there will be coders. Because the more management a project has, the harder it is to blame any one person.
b) Paper. Lots of paper. The amount of pages generated on specifications, revisions, reports, recommendations will be able 10 times the number of _lines_ of code created. All to show that no taxpayers money was wasted.
c) Tendering. It costs a lot to tender a bid, which reduces the competition to only the big ones who can afford to throw a million at a 1in5 chance. Whereas, if they were allowed to go to a small consultancy who only has 30 employees, they'd be able to get a much better price.
d) Changes. The requirements are often so written in very complex language that noone really understands it, and then they come along with changes every 2 months which require 3 months of recoding because they didn't fully understand what they were asking for to start with.
e) User acceptance. Don't underestimate the ability of a low level govt employee to refuse to use the new system because 'I've done it this way for 30 years and it worked just fine! This doesn't work like the old one did.'
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d) Changes. The requirements are often so written in very complex language that noone really understands it, and then they come along with changes every 2 months which require 3 months of recoding because they didn't fully understand what they were asking for to start with.
With federal government projects, and I assume with state projects as well, there are all kinds of specific guidelines and rules that have to be followed. If these aren't stated explicitly in the proposal, they cause cost overruns. For example: Only union employees are allowed to move servers, equipment must be sourced from certain suppliers, certain technologies such as bluetooth aren't allowed in some government locations... The unwritten requirements can go on and on.
Re:Why $208 million? (Score:4, Informative)
It all goes here.... not only do you have 40 years of data to port, but you also have 40 years of policies and procedures stemming from the old system that have to be enshrined in the new one. You also have to do the port in a way that has 0 downtime as you switch. And, since you can't magically switch hundreds of locations overnight, you have to make sure that the data, policies, and procedures stay in sync between the two systems during the migration period, because every location needs identical information from both systems.
Combine this with mandates such as "The specs for the new system are to exactly match all the quirks and behaviors of the old system" and you have a recipe for disasters like this.
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"A few hundred offices"? Think again. California is truly huge. If you assume one office per municipality there would still be thousands. The actual number is likely 10's of thousands.
Re:Why $208 million? (Score:5, Informative)
This has been a complaint too. For a state with a population of 38 million is (figure half of them drive) it's about 119,000 per DMV office. At 250 working days a year, that's 475 per office per day, or about 59 people per hour. That shouldn't be that hard, but the lines there are typically 1-3 hours long. They have a reservation system where you can make an appointment in advance. But the last time my registration came up for renewal, there was a problem which required me to visit the DMV instead of renew by mail. I tried to use their reservation system, only to discover that even though I was trying to make an appointment the day after I got the mailed notice, all the nearby DMV offices were booked solid until 3 weeks after the renewal deadline. I ended up making a reservation at some DMV office in the desert 70 miles away (still had to wait in line 45 min), and used the trip as an excuse to do some sightseeing and visit some friends in the area.
If you have a AAA membership, that's by far the best way to get your DMV stuff done in California (if it's a service they can do - they don't do driving tests and a few other things). I've never had to wait more than 30 min there, and usually they get to me within 5 minutes. They charge a few dollars more, but it's worth it compared to wasting several hours at the DMV.
In contrast, the RMV in Massachusetts and the DMV in Washington had wait times very similar to the AAA. Massachusetts even puts offices in the mall so parking is convenient and you can drop by while getting other shopping done. So I dunno what California is doing wrong, but whatever it is they're doing it very, very wrong.
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This system isn't just accessed by actual DMV offices. There are multiple users in every municipality.
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30 million drivers would get a name, DOB look up at a state, city, federal level and get added to over time.
Now every federal agency, state, city LEO and connected private detective is going to be making more and more facial recognition requests.
From background requests, bloated cyber budgets needing to show growth, protester watching to random Web 2.0 picture face finds.
Facial recognition math is not that CPU intensive - bu
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Not only that, but why reinvent the wheel?
California's requirements for a DMV system shouldn't be all that different from NY or TX or most other States. A new DMV system could just be redone 'once' for one state and then modifications made to the system base on -legal- requirements of another state.
I emphasize 'legal' reguirements, because the last thing you want are 'desired' or 'mandatory' requirements that aren't really needed. You sink in a lot more money due to incompetence.
Not surprising, at all (Score:2)
California of course is a behemoth of State agencies spread everywhere, not to mention hundreds more various County and Municipal agencies and departments. Just within the scope of the State of California there are massive agencies like the DMV, Health and Human Services (i.e., Welfare), State Parks, Department of Insurance, Franchise Tax Board, and dozens of regulatory agencies and sub-agencies, and the Legislature itself. Across these numerous agencies and departments there are hundreds of thousands of
Government + Consultants = Failure (Score:5, Insightful)
This is entirely normal when you take a government that chronically under-staffs on IT and relies on consultants. They go and try to do something big, and they don't have the expertise in house to deal with it. Enter more consultants, particularly of the variety that like to write a lot of powerpoint presentations and bill a lot of hours but never actually deliver a bloody thing. Of course, since the government doesn't have enough IT expertise to actually figure that out, the high level senior managers that love powerpoint and high-level mumbo jumbo MBA talk think everything is going well.
And then, scope creep happens. It follows one of three lines:
1. Election happens. New government comes in, with new priorities and a new way they want to do things. This is obviously bad for a huge project in progress.
2. The existing project has a new department join in, which means new managers and thus a new set of demands. Instead of starting up a new project, they try to shoehorn those into the current project to satisfy management's desire for design by a giant committee of managers.
3. Someone realizes that the project didn't actually have all the requirements properly captured in the first place, which is pretty much inevitable in my experience.
You'd think at some point the government would learn that they can't manage projects in this way and rely on consultants to sort it out, but they never do. Of course, in the case of #1 or #2 even in house IT doesn't really save you, but in my experience they tend to be more flexible than a giant Enterprise consulting outfit (mostly because there's no contract they can hide behind to deliver X, even if X doesn't actually solve the problem that prompted the project in the first place).
The whole process is a giant mess.
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Really? Why should a company with a head count of 100 in IT then go out and double or triple staff to get an initiative complete? What happens after your done? Do you keep that extra staff on? and when you say Government + Consultants = Failure, there's lots and lots of projects delivered to governments everywhere, on time and on budget. It's only when you hear about these problems that people jump to conclusions. The Government relies on Contractors to get new things done because most of the IT staff
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This is entirely normal when you take a government that chronically under-staffs on IT and relies on consultants. They go and try to do something big, and they don't have the expertise in house to deal with it.
Really close here. Every successful project I've been on that utilized a high % of contractors had insanely awesome people in house running the show. But Sacramento's top IT positions cap out under $100k... with no stock options.
Not gonna happen.
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Time for the Government to Take IT In-House? (Score:2)
Seems the Government Pork-Barrel is sewn-up by the Multi-Nationals who are only interested in milking mega-buck projects for all they are worth rather than delivering a working product anywhere near their promised completion date and cost estimates. And the problem doesn't stop there, even if the project is completed, typically the Contractor continues to milk it via Support Contracts and added Consulting Fees. These Support Contracts can eat away substantially at the State Budget in the event of unforeseen
Well having been there... (Score:2)
Could it be the government agency's fault? (Score:4, Insightful)
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> Could it be that the way the government contracts are structured and micromanaged by government agencies is the problem and not the contractor or their programmers?
Um, no. It's both.
Virginia DMZ (Score:2)
Wait What? (Score:3)
Oh, I see. It started under EDS auspices a few years back. Pretty light on details other than that, but let me guess, EDS proposed Citrix as a solution right out of the gate and set up the server on some 286 that they found in Ross Perot's attic. Am I getting warm? I'm pretty sure I'm getting warm, because EDS is a one-trick pony, and their trick sucks. Doesn't matter if you're setting up an accounting system or a next generation war ship, EDS will find SOME way to install Citrix on it. I'd say "and make it suck" but that's kind of redundant when you're talking about Citrix!
Too bad for the Government EDS is pretty much the only game in town if you need some IT contracting done. Enjoy your Citrix!
Bilking Government is an Art (Score:2)
And companies like HP, L3, Cisco, SAIC, and others, make Michelangelo look like my dog with a crayon.
I can save the state of California money (Score:2)
I hereby submit my $100M proposal to undertake an overhaul of the California DMV system, which will only cost $50M total when the state has to cut it short. Send your check now so the savings can start sooner!
Re:Typical of the Federal Government too (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about the government. It's all about the useless IT consulting companies. Pretty much every single flashy consulting company billboard/AD that you see at an airport is just a way to milk the gullible and not deliver. This is an across-the-board problem. Nobody wants to fucking do their jobs. The government thinks they don't need the right people to do it, so they hire a contractor. The contractor doesn't want to do the job either, it's not their core competency (nobody knows what it is anyway), so they hire subcontractors. Subcontractors have very little vested interest in anything, and they maybe deliver, maybe not, but due to multiple layers of clueless management, it's of no use anyway. So there you go.
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>95% of failed, past due or overbudget IT projects are a result of insufficient, incorrect or everchanging requirements from the customer organization and the people on our side who interface with them. It is a result of people thinking that computers are magic, large software projects are easy to change completely after they have been nearly completed, and people will understand what they mean instead of what they say.
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Look, when you're an IT consultant company, your first job is to do a discovery project that is aimed precisely at defining exactly what the project is -- in absence of proper requirements. Heck, if it's a bidding process, you must also do due diligence -- that would typically involve talking to the customer(s), talking to their employees, etc. It's your own fault, as a consulting company, if you can't deliver. You must be able to tell that the customer is too clueless to make it work. It's your fucking job
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I think you've been reading too much fiction. The discovery and due diligence processes are there for the benefit of the customer, in order to make it appear that you know what you're doing with their project, even when their project is a mess - which is most of the time.
If you tell the customer that they are clueless, you probably lost the contract. So, you have to pussyfoot around and figure out how you can make any progress at all, despite the fact that your management, and their management are both fi
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If your management is fighting you, you have already lost the battle -- you're working for the wrong bosses. As for their management: that's why you hire the right people who can set the customer straight while the customer is thinking all the time that they are in charge. Manipulating career bureaucrats is easy -- they are all the same, after all. You only need those who know how to pull it off working for you. That's all. I've heard first hand from a small European consulting company that undertook a few
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No. You are not getting it. It doesn't matter how hard you try, they NEVER know what they want. It will change, and they will expect you to turn everything around. Often they expect you to do that without delays or additional costs, or both. You can teach them what they want, they may even agree for a short time, but not for long.
Re:Typical of the Federal Government too (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that you are both right!
Just look at the new California high speed rail system and how it went from a simple concept to a bloated monster.
Both teams are screwing up and they will both blame the other team for the failure.
Re: Typical of the Federal Government too (Score:3)
Well, a contractor experienced supporting a particular industry would find the processes in place and help the customer learn about what can be done to improve them. Most customers moving to new tech won't know what to implement, they just know things need to be more efficient. As a contractor it is up to you to NOT do what the customer tells you, but to convince them to use the best solution for the problem.
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No. You are not getting it. It doesn't matter how hard you try, they NEVER know what they want.
It's worse than that.
The only people who tell you what they want are the know nothing fly by night management Eloi who plan to be elsewhere long before the collapse.
The government morlocks who actually know what they're talking about don't want to tell you - they don't want to be automated out of their positions, they don't want to lose their power, they don't want electronic trails of their activities, and they know that they never be blamed if they do nothing - only those who act get in trouble.
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Of course an IT shop has never heard of hiring a psychologist or two. Man, in business you have to manipulate your customers sometimes, I think you'd have known it by now. Sometimes it even takes experts to do such manipulation. A big IT consulting shop has resources to pull it off without thinking much, so to speak. It's not always about technology, but that doesn't mean it's out of your control.
Re:Typical of the Federal Government too (Score:4, Insightful)
"If the customers don't know what they want, you teach them" - Umm...if the customer doesn't know what they want then the project is in deep and immediate trouble. It is the customers business to run and if they don't know what they want they had damn well better figure it out before they spend a boatload of money on a team of consultants.
I have worked on many large projects, some with government agencies some with large private companies, and the most successful ones have a common thread. The common thread is that the critical project decisions are a collaborative effort, not simply punted to the consultants to say "here, you figure it out". If a company has management that is unwilling or unable to make decisions that company will fail. I don't care how many consultants you bring in, if the management cannot articulate how the business is currently run and what the future goals are the project will fail.
Are there shitty consultants out there? Sure. Just like there are company executives that have no business running a lemonade stand, never mind a multi-billion dollar company or large government office. To succeed you need talent on both sides.
Some of the government IT systems that I have been exposed to are arcane, to say the least. Often they have little or no documentation and are extremely complex. Many of the agencies are under funded and under staffed. Talent and motivation, frankly, are sometimes lacking. Basically it's a difficult environment to work in.
Really big projects like this have a high failure rate. There are a multitude of reasons, some of them above. I suspect that both sides share in the blame.
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>95% of failed, past due or overbudget IT projects are a result of insufficient, incorrect or everchanging requirements from the customer organization and the people on our side who interface with them.
Bingo.
The customer organization is multiple organizations, all with different agendas, some of which are surely to scuttle the project. Each organization is made of multiple people who come and go over time, with each new regime reevaluating and changing direction.
One of the sweet dynamics is not just that the government changes requirements - every new Eloi administration does that. But the morlocks in government who are actually in the know about the details don't want to tell you, because their butts are
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Nobody wants to fucking do their jobs.
That about sums it up right there.
Re:Typical of the Federal Government too (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh good grief what a bunch of bunk. Do you know why big contracting companies exist? It's because companies have lost faith in their internal organizations to deliver. Plain and simple. I've seen it in dozens of organizations in my career where an entrenched group builds a castle of "can't." So, the execs hire an outside firm not only to get what they want but to also force these little castles to actually deliver something. Lazy contractors? Please, how about lazy employees who feel that they hold the keys and as long as they keep pushing back and feel empowered so nobody is going to mess with their careers even though they may be doing such innovative things like writing System 360 Assembly Language. It's everywhere and it's not just in IT, people in this country have become lazy and foolish relying on attitude rather than customer service and trying to do a good job.
Every large organization has this problem and IT isn't just one of the areas where dead space can occur. So, the big companies come in, push change, make big promises that sometimes are overblown. In the case of California I could probably guess that the specifications of what were required were done by bureaucrats who have no clue on how to spec out requirements or were based on something that wasn't possible to build. Are there bad firms? yes, but are there bad customers? hell yes and they can make it absolutely impossible to deliver anything because the same people who have to approve or test anything are usually overworked, or not committed to the project leaving the contractor and subsequently the whole project in limbo. That usually leaves to failure despite the best efforts of all parties involved.
So before you blame consulting companies for this failure, remember they wouldn't exist if people were doing their job or came to the realization that their skills and abilities are out of alignment with what their management expects.
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Companies lost faith in their internal organizations? No, chicken shit unknowledgeable managers (not companies) don't want to take responsibility for doing anything more complex than a CRUD service, so they send it to Accenture and IBM. It is a big blame game and a web of CYAs.
Re:Typical of the Federal Government too (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some cases also where this misalignment of skills and management expectations is more of a management deficiency. Many organizations have technical people who are quite willing and capable, but they have been pigeon-holed and beaten down by policies which incentivize apathy. I have worked with long-time developers in quasi-government jobs who have skills only on legacy systems, and I have had the pleasure of helping them participate in the development of modern SOA interfaces. Most of these people just need an opportunity to learn, grow, and feel like their contributions will be meaningful. And it is not expensive, in fact if it looks expensive you are doing it wrong! You don't need or want conventional "training" for them, and if it is done right, it can cost little or nothing in extra time. These people have a goldmine of lost productivity to tap into -- productivity that poor management has beaten out of them and that good management can cash in on.
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This. I hired a popular 'big' construction company to do some renovations on my business. They got as far as fucking everything up and then holding on to the money as long as possible. It took a lawsuit and a solid WEEK in civil court to get them to give ANY of the money back. Once they were court ordered to give the money back, they received extension after extension and after all was said and done, I had my money back and then had to shop for other people to do the work.
Guess what? Very few of them w
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It's not about the government. It's all about the useless IT consulting companies.
Funny, having worked with many consultants over the years my company hasn't had problems with them to this extent. If they were universally bad you'd think private companies would dump them. Which of course we do when they screw up. You're barking up the wrong tree. The problem is lax government oversite, its not thier money, they don't give a shit.
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Mod parent up. We know the contractor has been fired - how many government employees got fired for this failure?
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Incidentally on the consultancy side, the same 'usual suspects' EDS, Cap-Gemini and Accenture, for example, tend to be involved nearly every time.
How
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My experience is that the problem is too much govt. oversight. At least in my industry they don't say okay we need a system to do this, how much will it cost, how will you implement it, okay, that looks fine, now go ahead and do it! It's no I want it done this way, and then two weeks later I want it done that way, and then I want it totally changed to this, and now that.
The unethicalness of govt. contracting co.'s is in saying sure whatever to all of that, because they get paid all the same. I get paid all
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I have trouble believing that a normal IT department is equipped to do a large-scale migration, especially when they need
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Problem 1: Sales team says yes to everything the customer wants.
Problem 2: The business managers think anything tech-related is trivial. Commoditized. Already been done before. Simple to implement.
Problem 3: Uncooperative government employees who don't want to be bothered or want to protect their little empire.
These are very difficult issues.
Re: Problem 1 - if our sales team doesn't nod eagerly at every requirement, someone else's team will. The customer can't tell if he's being lied to or not.
Re: Problem 2
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Maybe invest in a dictionary? The word "too" isn't just a random bunch of letters, it means something.
Re:Typical of the Federal Government too (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought it was an "emoticon" of a large breasted woman giving the finger.
Re:Typical of the Federal Government too (Score:5, Funny)
I'll never look at that word the same way again :)