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Struggling With Major IT Projects
Ant writes "This article discusses the poor track record of IT projects undertaken by the U.S. government, and says experts blame poor planning, rapid industry advances and the massive scope of some complex projects whose price tags can run into billions of dollars at U.S. agencies with tens of thousands of employees. 'There are very few success stories,' said Paul Brubaker, former deputy chief information officer (CIO) at the Pentagon. 'Failures are very common, and they've been common for a long time.'... Seen on Blue's News."
The only IT projects that failed that I know are the ones that have bad managers... Most of the time that means someone who doesn't listen to the people that do the actual work but there are other reasons...
Peter.
The largest commnist government have either failed orstarted to use market forces to grow. Large IT projects have similar aspects. I have been watching one of he larget the Navy Marine Corps Intranet from the sidelines for a while. It has been easy to throw stones after the fact, but it would have taken an IQ of 500 to figure this thing out. If I knew the solution I would not post it here...
The reason these projects are failures, or cost too much is because they are not being done out of need, but from strings pulled to dole out corporate welfare. Every industry the US is internationally competitive in (except maybe Hollywood) has (or had) most of it's R&D paid for by Uncle Sam - aerospace, the Internet, pharmaceutical companies and so forth. It's the old Keynesian thing of the government burying bills in old wine bottles and having some company come and dig them up. Government spending, which in the US usually means Pentagon spending, has been greasing the wheels of the US economy since FDR took office. The only difference between the two major parties is Republicans tend to want to build rockets/lasers that can shoot down rockets and that sort of thing, while Democrats want the money to go towards biotechnology and things like that. If you want to see what's going on, don't look at the end result and try to discern what went wrong, but look at the legislative process, and what pressures are in effect there. Billions of dollars was not really wasted - it made work for many people, imagine what unemployment would have been if it hadn't. It's the old bills in buried wine bottles story. I mean think of some of the ridiculous things proposed - billions for a "missile-defense shield"? It's just a way to spread money around. I don't like how the Democrats or Republicans do this, I have other ideas of how that money could be used for make-work.
The Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) is an ongoing example of a federally-funded IT project that has failed to deliver. For over $6 billion, the Navy was promised a complete data, voice and wireless communications system that was fast, secure and reliable.The voice and wireless portions were vapor before the project even began. The data network is a discombobulated mess of machines with software that's already three generations behind and a level of bandwidth that's adequate at best and pitiful at worst.
To get a single change made on this network (move a user account, add hardware, etc) requires time, paperwork and outrageous costs. In spite of survey after survey of NMCI users who are unhappy with the new network, the Navy continues to push this as the coming thing, with the attitude at the top of "take it or leave." I've been fighting for months to get security groups built and shared data resources mapped in a way that makes sense to my users. Most of the are still sitting with two separate computers on their desks, connected to two different networks, just to get their work completed.
I also manage a small operational network that hasn't been forced to convert to NMCI yet. I'm trying to imagine what my users would do to me if I managed that small LAN and it's resources as badly as NMCI is managed by the contractor and the Navy.
Primarily written for a UK audience, where we are well used to spectacular goverment IT project failure and runaway spending (ID cards? Erm, with your track record? You must be joking!)
e d_ IT_Projects.cfm
This book is excellent:
http://www.iee.org/OnComms/PN/Management/Troubl
It contains much wisdom on the subject of major IT project failure and quite a lot of insightful material taken from notable historical project cock-ups.
I like the approach of identifying 40 common root causes (a good proportion of which I've seen in my career, at least once), of course, most of them involve failure to communicate requirements and expectations during the early stages.
This stuff is mostly common sense, but of course common sense is always in short supply as the deadline draws inexorably closer and the project managers start to loose their grasp on reality...
(I am referring to the Sponsorship Scandal)
You've obviously never worked on a government program. Sometimes the oversight is all there is and the project is just secondary.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Yes, but if you actually live in Japan, you will realize that American ATMs have a single advantage over Japanese ATMs that trumps all of that.
You can use all functions of an American ATM at any time of the day, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
None of the "Withdrawal only after 5:30" crap that you have to put up with over here.
As someone working to develop a system that will be used by the UK government, I can tell you that statement is very true. Not only that, they often don't actually know what they want. They'll give you a vague specification and they'll tell you they want features X, Y and Z, but when you hand over the completed system, they turn round and say they didn't ask for that, they wanted something different.