Slashdot Mirror
Four IT Consultants Charged With $80M NYC Rip-Off
theodp writes "It's I-told-you-so time for Slashdot commenter frnic, who smelled a crime last March after reading that New York City had dropped $722 million on its still-under-development CityTime Attendance System. Nine months later, US Attorney Preet Bharara charged 'four consultants to the New York City Office of Payroll Administration ... for operating a fraudulent scheme that led to the misappropriation of more than $80 million in New York City funds allocated for an information technology project known as "CityTime."' Three of the four consultants were also charged — along with a consultant's wife and mother — with using a network of friends-and-family shell corporations to launder the proceeds of the fraud. Dept. of Investigations Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn called it a shame that 'supposed experts hired and paid well to protect the city's interests were exposed as the fox guarding the hen house.'"
How does something "slip through the cracks" for 7 years?
A project that was $68 million total... instead was $100+ million (a year?!!)
If the city DIDN'T spend MORE-THAN-HALF-A-BILLION maybe they wouldn't be raising the fare on the subway/bus for the 3rd time in just a few years.
Here's a thought.. once a year look at projects and see if they were supposed to be done already. You can pay someone $1,000 a MINUTE to do this and still save money by finding another project like this.
...is that everyone does it differently, and no one wants to conform to a uniform system. Why, you might ask? Because the current system is in place and, more importantly, people have learned how to game it.
I went through something like this years ago with a local government t&a project. There was a core group that understood it's value ( namely, IT and payroll ), but everyone else had been using tricks of the current, in place system ( which varied from dept to dept ) to get longer lunches, swap shifts or plain, flat out not work and get paid for it.
We never did get universal buy-in for the project, and it ended up dieing ( although, to be fair, the vendor didn't help things much ). Even in the best of times, T&A is a highly complex subject that almost no one understands. When you have people actively trying to undermine your efforts...well, you can imagine how much progress one might make.
( note: the depts that gave us the most headaches, btw, were fire and police. The "old boy" network had been in place so "billy bob" might take off a couple extra hours because he was the chief's friend. Needless to say, the new time keeping software didn't keep track of that "accurately", and people's feelings got hurt. )
The second most important single document in project management - the stakeholders list.
The most misunderstood term in project management - stakeholder.
Stakeholder == anyone who might possibly want to stab you with a pointy stick.
Most important document - a list of motivations and pain points of the stakeholders. Third most important - payment terms. Fourth - project delivery specifications.
Feel free to disagree, and, good luck.
;-p