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."

Comments

Management?

[loony]

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.

Re:Management?

[Frymaster]

Good management should replace bad techies long before the project fails

great... but who replaces the bad managers?

my experience is that projects fail because of managers who get caught between two opposing forces, clients and tech staff, and can't broker a compromise.

the client wants a million features for next to no money and wants the product by thursday noon. since they're paying the bills, they can exert a lot of pressure on a manager. the techies want clear direction on technical issues that neither the client nor management really groks, tonnes of time and the right to overrule bad decisions made by the client. since the techies are the people who are actually doing the building, they have a lot of leverage.

when management cannot broker a compromise between these two positions, the project fails. i've seen management say 'yes' to every demand and timeline from a client, then go to the techies and say the client is clueless and stubborn and insist that corners be cut to meet the deadline. when the poject fails, the manager blames the techies and hands out some pink slips to mollify the client.

The real reason...

[br00tus]

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.

Re:IQ

[sfjoe]

You've obviously never worked on a government program. Sometimes the oversight is all there is and the project is just secondary.