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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 summary ignores that corporations are just as bad, but that corporations don't admit their problems. This is one area we find the Fed fessing up.
Just like the sports analogy, the coach needs to put the players in a position to win. Bad management = bad coach. Unfortunately the techies are always the ones to get blamed and get fired.
My observation is that is a combination of territorial office politics, automating bad processes instead of fixing processes, and not learning from past projects.
The second is a case where there are all kinds of intertangled, unnecessarily complicated business rules that are required or requested. Often these are dictated by legislation or attempts to "satisfy all stake-holders".
There should be some kind of bidding process on features such that features which gum-up the works will be charged to the customer somehow. Perhaps have a cost/benefit analysis/estimate be done on each feature, and chop off the ones that rank low (by being either too low priority or too costly).
Another thing I find totally lacking is any documentation of the design decisions. Before spending gazillion dollars on a fat project, the design and architecture should be seen and/or suggested by several expert eyes and every one of their written critiques and evaluations should be saved, whether used or not.
Then when a project succeeds or fails, one can see which ideas and/or which consultant/expert seemed to have the best insite or vision. Otherwise you keep reinventing the same mistakes over and over again.
Table-ized A.I.
With BlueGene, the US gov't approached IBM and told them "We want the fastest super computers in the world. We want to eventually reach the the Petaflop range. Here's some money. Do it" and IBM happily complied. Late last year, the BlueGene/L prototype recaptured the title of world's fastest computer from the Japanese. The BlueGene/C design is due (on time) in June and should be available from the foundry in August (full discloser - my grad work involves testing & verficiation of this). The lesson? Where IT is concerned, the Government has a legitimate interest in outsourcing it to reliable companies (prefarably US based for security reasons).
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
We have the same problem in the UK, and I expect it is the same everywhere. I have worked on good projects backed by government money, but the problems seem to arise when the government is the provider of the detailed requirements. I think this is because the government can only provide top level requirements, and the detail should be fleshed out by experienced requirements analysts. Unfortunately, government organisations do not consist of high achievers who have made their way to the top through good decisions. Government organisations consist of people who have made their way to the top by cautiously waiting long enough, and their natural instinct is to avoid tough decisions. Of course, tough trade-offs have to be faced and dealt with to reach a coherent set of requirements. Any project with the government will not be able to do this without a lot of futile hand wringing and back tracking. Coupled with all that is the fact that government people have an innate belief that they, not the technologists, are in control. They believe they can realise change faster that the technologists can provide it. Technology development has a pace that technologists understand, while government people have different objectives that may be changed in a hurry as public opinion sways this way and that.
I stole this