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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!
Isn't it?
Coming Soon
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
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.
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
Or buy one of the many solutions already available....for about the cost of 1 developer for 1 year.
THL phish sticks
If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
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."
This isn't government corruption. It's private enterprise. The idea is that government is fundamentally incompetent. Anything done by a government will not work. So government can't hire employees to work on software projects. Instead, it hires private enterprise to do it. Private enterprise is efficient and effective, and the result is savings.
This way of thinking has brought us multi-billion-dollar FAA upgrades that didn't work, new IRS d-bases that failed utterly, and created a whole industry of government contractors whose sole function in life is to transfer tax money from your pocket to theirs. The sad fact is that five programmers at Lawrence Livermore Labs could have gotten this done in a year for $500k. The outsourcing model doesn't work for us. Tragically, it *does* work for the people to whom the money flows, and so they lobby for it, and we get government contractors instead of government employees doing these projects.
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
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
How hard can it be to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system.
Answer: difficult, but definitely doable in a reasonable time frame.
However, you've obviously never worked on a big bureaucracy-driven project before, because you've asked the wrong question.
Here's the correct question:
How hard is it to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system when the fundamental requirements change on a monthly basis, individual design changes are made weekly, all because there are fifteen project managers who believe they own the project, since the primary project manager who actually does own the project spends all of his time in asinine meetings with his bosses and doesn't know what the hell is going on?
Answer: virtually impossible.
All that situation needs are a bunch of blind fools in upper management to keep approving the extensions and cost overruns and you have the NYC CityTime project.
It happens all the time in any sufficiently large bureaucracy, and the NYC government is definitely a sufficiently large bureaucracy. Note that this is not a private/public problem, it's a bureaucracy problem. The exact same thing happens to projects in large corporations (I work in a top 100 corporation and see this kind of thing happen all the time, though they are usually much quicker to pull the plug on a project than NYC is in this case).
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)