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Army's Huge SAP Project 'At High Risk'
itwbennett writes "The Army's $2.4 billion SAP project is delayed, over budget, and, once implemented may not even meet its original objectives, according to a recent auditors' report. For its part, the Army is less concerned with the auditors' findings about the project that will manage a $140 billion annual budget and serve nearly 80,000 users once it is complete: 'The Army believes the risks identified in this report are manageable and do not materially impact the [project's] cost and schedule,' said an official with the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology)."
When you go with SAP.
The only people who will get something out of SAP are the consultants who get paid to "fix" it.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Why that isn't cancelled, but Webbs telescope is? Ah, its thats the Army....
RIP US space program
Because:
a) They always employ people with the right connections instead of the right competence
b) Because the consultants they hire know the real money comes from doing it wrong? Why make an effort to deliver on schedule and under budget when you can take your time over it and earn twice as much money in the process?
You might think I'm joking but I've sat in some of the meetings. When I arrived I was under the delusion that I was there to do some work but I was completely wrong, we were only there to kill time before going off to a nice little French restaurant somebody had discovered. My bad.
No sig today...
c) They still believe in Waterfall development methodology. They also believe in "fixed-price" contracts. It's the change requests that kill you. The consultants gladly build what you asked for. Then when you realize that you really didn't know what you wanted, they have you.
It fails just as often in the private sector, the difference being that there, the client usually goes bankrupt before you hear about it.
- The user interface is the worst of any software product I've ever used, and I'm not exaggerating.
- The user documentation is even worse
- I'm told the developer documentation is worser still, esp. if you don't speak German.
- COBOL is so fucking awesome.
- It costs a leg, an arm, your first born and your left nuts. Oh and your soul.
Yes it does. You just don't get to hear about it either because it's confidential or because private sector waste isn't a good story.
I have worked on many projects in the private sector and heard about plenty more where the IT director has believed what a salesman told them and ended up with an absolute disaster. What you say might be true for SMBs but big organisations are not too different to the public sector.
The SAP R/3 kernel is written in C. The application layer is written in ABAP and can be extended in ABAP or Java. So, the the claim with COBOL is BS.
Well, I'm a consultant working primarily for government, and I can honestly say that those aren't the reasons why these projects fail.
Corruption in hiring is surprisingly rare in western countries, and usually involves only a small subset of the people on a large project. I've heard it's a serious problem in developing countries, but I've only seen it a few times here, and and I've only ever seen it lead to a project failure when the project team was only a handful of people.
You'd be surprised about the work ethic of consultants.
For some consulting organizations, there's so much work that they prefer to have their consultants finish projects quickly so that they can go on to other projects and hence satisfy all of their customers, not just some of them. Not turning up at all is a surefire way of losing a customer to your competition, which can go from nonexistent to serious in very little time if they suddenly start landing big projects.
More commonly, consulting is only a part of what a company does. Large vendors like SAP sell licenses, support contracts, and consulting separately. If one branch of the company starts annoying the customers (too expensive, slow, incompetent, etc...) then this drags down the results of other branches too, and then their executives become very angry and complain directly to the CEO. God help the consultant working for an organization that makes most of their profit from licenses if the fuck up a sales deal!
Lastly, consulting firms tend to hire better-than-average people, and those tend to be high achievers and motivated professionals. Delivering projects on time and on budget looks good on a CV, and can lead to even more lucrative positions.
I've seen enough projects that I've figured out that government contracts go over budget or time for several inter-related reasons:
- Ridiculous levels of risk aversion -- if there's no bonus or profit to be had, then no risk is worth it. This leads to some very stupid decisions, over-engineering, etc...
- Management overhead -- big bureaucracies ignore the cost of management overhead, because the only way to reduce it is to fire a bunch of managers, but management makes hiring and firing decisions! Almost nobody would ever fire themselves. Instead, managers rationalize the need for management. There's no arguing with people about useless processes, when the existence of that process, useful or not, keeps them employed.
- Conservative approach to IT -- a big project is hard enough, but when you also have to deal with decades old software and sometimes even hardware, the difficulty becomes astronomical. In quite recent times, I've come across all sorts of fun things in the core infrastructure of large organizations. For example, OS/2 is still in use. Novell NetWare refuses to die. I've seen Windows 95 as a server in a data center just recently. I did a lot of work on an enterprise DOS application just a couple of years ago. It's not just systems, but processes to. Why change anything, just because the software is completely different, and the hardware is six orders of magnitude bigger or faster?
So imagine being the consultant hired to rip up and replace 10s of millions of lines of code across hundreds of undocumented systems, most of which should have been cleansed with purifying fire decades ago, but you're not allowed to. Instead, you have to sit patiently through a never ending series of pointless meetings that serve only to prevent any bureaucrat from ever having to make a decision, or take any blame for anything.