NYC Drops $722M On CityTime Attendance System

theodp writes "New York City is reportedly paying 230 consultants an average annual salary of $400K for a computer project that is seven years behind schedule and vastly over budget. The payments continue despite Mayor Bloomberg's admission that the computerized timekeeping and payroll system — dubbed CityTime — is 'a disaster.' Eleven CityTime consultants rake in more than $600K annually, with three of them making as much as $676,000. The 40 highest-paid people on the project bill taxpayers at least $500K a year. Some of the consultants have been working at these rates for as long as a decade."

Comments

How hard can it be

[wisnoskij]

How hard can it be to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system.

230 highly paid people and it has been underdevelopment for over a decade?
1 person should of been able to get it done in a decade.

Re:Slaves

[Bigjeff5]

It isn't fraud on the part of the consultants if the project is poorly managed. They charge what they charge, and if there is nobody saying "This is what the project covers, anything else needs to be a separate project with its own approvals and a separate budget." then it is 100% the fault of the program manager, who works for the government.

It's called scope creep, and it can raise costs astronomically. For example, I know of a project right now that is in the $10 million range that started out as a simple $300,000 parts change. It start as "Such and such needs to be upgraded, so we'll do X and it will be done." Then someone comes along with the bright idea "Well, if you're going to do X, you might as well just do Y instead." Y doubles the cost of the project, but we want it, right? Ok, fine. Then someone comes along and says "Well, if you are going to go ahead and do Y, it only makes sense to do M at the same time." M, of course, doubles the cost of the project. Well, the project is becoming complicated, so we need to hire an engineering firm (which is actually just one guy, but he's really good) to design the system. He charges $150 an hour for his time. He has spent a month designing the system, is essentially finished, when someone in another division gets wind of the project and goes to management with "Well, if they are doing M now, it's a perfect opportunity to do J at the same time and kill two birds with one stone!" This is apparently only a minor cost, but it does mean the engineer has to re-design the system.

We are now into the several million dollar range, and guess what? We just discovered that by starting work on J we have compliance issues, which means we need a team of third-party analysts to come in and determine if the final system will be in compliance with state and local regulations. Now things are getting complicated, you have to bring in a work planner (who charges $50 an hour) on top of everyone else just to keep things running smoothly. And guess what? If that $150 engineer is held up because of someone else's problem he's still charging his time.

Before long you've spent $10 million on a $300,000 project and have absolutely nothing to show for it. Oh yeah and that engineer has made over $300,000 in the year this project has gone on (remember he originally finished it in a month, but it changed).

I guarantee this is almost the exact same scenario for this time system debacle. Don't blame the consultants, it's rarely truly their fault beyond the final delivery of a shoddy product. They'll only be doing exactly what you tell them to. If what you tell them changes from week to week, expect the project to never end and expect a huge bill. They were just smart enough to charge a high enough rate that they could ride the chaos generated by poor project management and pad their bank accounts with other people's incompetence.

They aren't necessarily doing anything wrong, or even unethical. The whole thing is almost certainly not entirely their fault, if at all.

Remember this with regards to project management: Quality assurance is the responsibility of the vendor (the consultants), quality control is the responsibility of the customer (NYC). If the consultants really were scamming the government, the PM should have been refusing payment years ago. More likely, the PM is incompetent and kept changing the scope or allowing others to change the scope, preventing the consultants from actually finishing the job. It's much more common than it should be, and no matter the situation the buck stops with the project manager, not the consultant.

What's truly amazing is that the upper management kept approving the massive budget for this obviously failing project.