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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."
... oversight is on vacation? What does a project have to do to get sh!t canned? I could have not delivered a timekeeping and payroll system for 1/2 that!
I guess they need some kind of system to keep track of their timetables and salaries!
Isn't it?
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---- Booth was a patriot ----
Coming Soon
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
This defense contractor SAIC is just a symptom of the special interests that are running this country. Multiple it by 1,000,000 and you understand why our country is going bankrupt. The nature of our DOE, NASA, and DOD budgets allow for this type of uncontrolled spending. People need to take charge of elections and actively support smaller and more responsive government.
Stay skeptical, my friends.
If you RTFA, the people that are getting the highest salaries are "Project Managers". Generally these types of people don't know their ass from a hole in the ground and don't actually contribute to doing any work because they have no idea what it is they're doing. And these people are likely the reason the project isn't actually getting done. In fact, the people actually doing the grunt work on the project are likely making 10% of the stated figures.
This sort of thing happens in many, many businesses. The difference is that many businesses aren't required to report those figures and even then they are under far less scrutiny. I assure you this is about par course for American business in general both public and private.
There are better ways to do things, but until we vastly change the corporate culture that everyone is used to operating under we aren't going to see more efficiencies. The reality is that it's not the "government" wasting money here because this is what everyone that goes into these projects expects to be doing. And this is generally something that scales with said project; so cheaper projects get cheaper prices on management but it is still disproportionately higher than those that are doing the actual work.
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.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Hell, I've got 15+ years of experience with computers and some big name corporations (e.g. Time Inc & Oracle) in my resume. I'd be willing to do the job of two of the consultants for half as much.
The real question here is *who* is responsible for the project and is employing these people (who clearly seem to have no interest in getting the job done)? For example, if two or three individuals can rewrite a relatively robust DBMS (Oracle) in less than 2 years (circa 1983-84, the Oracle Version 3-->4 rewrite) having this many people not getting the job done in a decade screams to me of incompetence.
What is the purpose of an attendance system? To make sure someone is getting to work on time and not leaving before quitting time?
Sometimes people say that government employees should have greater scrutiny due to their being paid by the taxpayers, but I'm uncomfortable turning them into slaves.
I'd bet that if they didn't keep track of anyone's time that many people (maybe even you) would be complaining that people are showing up for work late, leaving early and generally 'working the system'. And they'd be right.
Governments (including NYC) are beholden to their citizens - and this includes making sure that people are showing up for their government jobs. They may not do a very good job at it (serving their c8itizens and/or doing their government jobs) but they damn well better try.
Pubic service is voluntary. It happens by directly applying for a position, appointment, or being elected.
Last i heard no one was forced into working for the government ( well, forced taxation and convicted prisoners not withstanding :) )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Consulting: When you're not part of the solution, there is good money in prolonging the problem.
No, it's to track the hours they worked so they can be properly paid- the other part is just data that the system provides so that managers can know they're cheating on the system.
Since it's effectively little more than a fancy punch clock, I'd think that it'd not be THAT difficult to do. I'm amazed that they're pouring that much cash into a bottomless pit on this- and then doing more of it instead of pulling the plug and starting over.
Screw egg on face moments here- you're pouring $722 MILLION dollars into what is an overglorified punch clock system. If it's not working by now, it's not going to EVER work right and that's some serious good money after bad that could be put elsewhere.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
being able to prove that you were in fact clocked in and working from 8:55 to 16:05 on monday (and the other 4 days of the week within about 2 minutes) does real wonders for GETTING PAID FOR THOSE TIMES. or for the cases where you actually left on thursday at 20:00 because something went BANG and you had to handle it.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
In 1995, I built a Time and Attendance system using Informix and Powerbuilder 5. I was the sole developer and didn't know Powerbuilder when I started. In less than 6 months, it was up and running in 16 divisions.
Sure, a city is more complicated, but this isn't rocket science.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I work at a sizable county government in California, and while our timekeeping systems aren't nearly as fancy as to require millions of dollars of investment, they do have to provide an accounting of what people work on. A good portion of the staff are able to have one- or two-line timesheets, as the work they do comes out of one bucket. Others, like me, may have anywhere from 10 to 30 lines a week as we work on different projects or tickets and have to bill the time appropriately.
However, neither of the two systems (one for employees, one for contractors) tracks when people actually arrive and depart. There are mechanisms to enter that data, but it's done by the staff member, not by the badge-reading system. From a technical perspective, I could show up at 10, take a two-hour lunch, then leave at 2, and say that I arrived at 7am, worked my normal shift with a one-hour lunch, and went home at 5. It's only my work ethic (and to a much smaller extent the fact that I would get caught quickly by my boss) that keeps me from doing it.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
the sad thing is that the taxpayers put up with it. and many even defend it.
You may have parsed that wrong. He says voluntary servitude in a private business is not his concern. Voluntary servitude in a public office, OTOH, is his concern since it is a public affair. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, just clearing up the difference. I assume involuntary servitude in either situation would concern him.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
They are saving money, because any off-the-shelf time-tracking software would cost much more than $722 million. Oh, wait ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
Of course this is disgraceful, but it's by no means limited to government - there's plenty of waste in private industry, we just don't hear about it as much. I have a friend who recently worked as a consultant for one of the big health insurers in California. She talked about a multi-hundred-million-dollar development project on a new IT system that they scrapped before implementing. You'd think someone could have pulled the plug before the project got into 9 figures.
Of course, from a cost standpoint, healthcare is a disaster here in the US (I think we spend about 2x as much per-person as the next highest country, and I suspect it will only get worse under the new reforms). Having relatives who work in healthcare, and seeing the mess that's resulted from multiple, independent providers who don't share data efficiently (i.e. hospitals, doctors and clinics) and multiple, independent insurance monopolies that negotiate separately with each provider, I can't imagine a public healthcare system wouldn't be better than what we have. Of course, half the country seems to think having the government involved in healthcare is 'evil socialism'... at least until they hit 65 and go on Medicare, at which point most of them seem to like it.
When I see how the US reacts to complex debates like this it's hard to believe we've been as economically and militarily successful as we have.
- ss
I read TFA and saw that a private company called "Science Applications International Corp." was running the project.
So, why is that people are blaming the government when it is the private sector that is wasting all this money? Sure, it's tax-payers' money but aren't we constantly told by various private sector financed think tanks that this public work is best outsourced to the private sector? Well, this is what happens, folks.
And if you think the private sector is any better, you're living in a fantasy land. It's just that they are less liable to scrutiny. When corruption happens in private organizations, it gets brushed under the carpet. Why? Because it looks not only bad for the culprit (obviously) but also the guy who employed him - no matter that he had nothing to do with the scam. Everybody stay silent and nobody gets hurt, right?
I've seen this soooo many times in the private sector - outsourced procurement agencies that charge $1000 for a $500 desktop, outsourced projects that were awarded to a consultancy that was (by shocking coincidence) run by the brother of the guy on the committee overseeing the outsourcing etc etc. In all these cases, it's hard to prove that actual fraud took place (eg, "well, we really did think this was the best offer when you consider all the factors").
And nobody in a private organization is ever, ever going to be prosecuted for these scams. Why would they? Who wants to pursue such cases? The shareholders don't care about such small corruption even if they got to hear of it. The media are not interested (a private company can spend its money as it sees fit). And an employee is only going to ruin his career.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
Is it just me or do Americans seem to have some kind of blind spot when it comes to government corruption? In any other country, this would've immediately been called for what it is, plain old corruption, and would be a scandal. It is obvious what is happening here.
The story is inaccurate. The City is not employing these persons and is not paying these persons a salary or any other type of compensation.
The City has hired a company to perform the work and this other company is paying these persons some type of compensation. These persons will never see anything close to the stated "salaries".
The rates being charged are not out of line with rates being charged elsewhere.
Did you RTFA? They did outsource the project to an established contractor, SAIC. This is what happened.
I worked at a job where we had to swipe our badges in/out. Management noticed that people would just give their badges to a friend and leave early. The friend would swipe them out on time (and they would switch back and forth). The solution was to install a thumb print scanner.
This was at a private for-profit nursing home.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
She was laid off and promptly given 2/3rds her previous salary in unemployment benefits. Pretty good for keeping the same employer and just not working anymore. If I tried that it would result in a 100% pay cut.
Yeah, and there's not chance that you'd be able to get unemployment benefits, right? Or is it just that you object to the idea of unemployment benefits.
I'd mod you up but I prefer to chime in. I have a punch clock at $WORK, and since the setup is well done it's surprisingly painless, even agreeable. I'm supposed to work an average of 7h48m per day, sign in in a 90-minute window, sign out in a three-hour window, work at least five and at most ten hours a day, with automatic carries of +- 3 h/week or 4h/4weeks. With regular working hours you only notice when you forget to punch or when you're absent without warning. Then you get an automatic mail.
Now, with those working hours, I most certainly do not earn USD 600K per year, not even 543,698 like the guy on a 30-hour week at CityTime. 600K should be enough for all the software, maybe even including the servers... Feature creep maybe, but near-criminal mismanagement, most certainly.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
True, but you can't blame them for catching it...unless they misrepresented things or otherwise acted unethically.
I'm saying NYC pretty much deserves what it gets.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Hmmmm.... So you think that perpetrating fraud on the general public by not delivering a product, or in the case of those in charge of the product, not requiring a time limit for a working product, isn't stealing?
No matter what your excuse this is corruption, plain and simple. If the project is impossible to complete because of conflicting requirements, for the developers to not state that it's impossible to deliver a working product and quit, but just continue to accept money for a decade is fraud. They know they aren't going to deliver but keep on taking money as if they are. It's plain old theft from the general public and a blatant example of the problems created where both consultants and project management are ethically-challenged, to put it politically correct term. In real life it's just called theft through a collusion of a bunch of crooks.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
If the government had done it, it would have cost even more. I am sure the free market will punish these consultants accordingly.
I don't know...is it?
If we are talking a bunch of corrupt city officials stringing this project along so their buddies make a killing and then kickback some of the funds to the city official, that's one thing. They all should go to jail.
But if we are talking just incompetent city officials continuing to pay people way too much for way too long, then no, it's not unethical. Again, assuming that the consultants are not padding the numbers, stalling, etc.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I blame the paradigm of "government". No competition. No alternative sources for their services.
Yeah, those countries that have two competing governments are just a blast to live in.
You do know what party controls New York, right?
Well, Michael Bloomberg is still mayor, so I think it depends on the day of the week.
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.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Yes, yes it is. If someone offers you exorbitant compensation from public funds and imposes no consequences for failure to deliver, it is unethical to persist once you realize what's going on since you're basically stealing from the public. Both sides of the deal are in the wrong. If the donor were a private entity, then there's no problem.
So, your project has now gone on for 10 years with no end in sight? There's also a major difference between spending $10 million on a project, and 3/4 of $1 billion on a failed project.
Are you sure you really want to defend that kind of behavior as just the "normal cost of development" for nothing more than a time management system? Just how can those costs ever be recovered? That no one is standing up in that project and looking out for the public good, as it's public money being wasted, spells nothing but corruption to me.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
That or give them a guaranteed end date with penalties for going over. Either one works great.
The biggest thing though, is knowing what you want/need ahead of time. More than likely the reason the project is still going on today is not because the contractors have been milking it (even though I'm sure they have been).
This project has scope creep written all over it, and the best written contracts with the most honest and efficient company in the world will not be able to finish a project where the scope is perpetually changing. It is impossible by definition.
It sounds like they contracted out all the project management, which means they probably did not empower those PM's with the ability to cancel all or part of the project. They then likely allowed multiple departments to make "suggestions" which the PMs were forced to accommodate. The cycle is vicious, and it takes a strong, honest, and empowered project manager to prevent it.
When the NYC government requests a change, and the consultant says "We can do that, but it will cost another $100 million", and the government signs the contract adjustment, you cannot blame the consultant. Period.
To put it another way, there is no way the government can pay out $700 million on a contract without the government approving the cost.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
1. Client calls for tenders on a vaguely-defined project.
2. Outsourcing companies put in bids that are _very_ keenly priced. It's not unusual for the initial big to be a break-even, or even a loss-maker for the outsourcing company.
3. Client chooses lowest bidder - even if other bidders are clearly better-qualified to do the job.
4. Contract is signed, including a clause where any variance to the original spec is to be billed at $X per hour (typically several times the rate for the original work).
5. Every frakking thing in the contract is then gone over with a fine tooth comb, and if any part of the necessary work wasn't explicitly specified, it becomes a variance. Meetings are called with the client to discusss these variances. At every meeting there will be 2 or 3 client representatives, and 6 or 8 contractor representatives, these meetings are billed to the client at $X per person per hour. The longer it takes to agree on the revised specs, the more the contractor makes.
6. Actual work then commences. Inevitably, more ambiguities or outright bugs in the original spec are discovered. This leads to more very profitable (for the contractor) meetings.
7. When the project is half way finished, there's a change in management at the client, and the new manager feels the urge to "make his mark" by having an organizational re-structure. Everyone gets new job titles, new business cards, new reporting lines. This requires changes to the software, which requires more meetings....
The above describes an outsourcing project I worked on where the client was a large private business, where the client is government, you have a whole 'nother layer of bureaucracy adding far more opportunity for highly profitable (for the contractor) meetings.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)