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FBI's Troubled Sentinel Project Delayed Again
gManZboy writes "The FBI's Sentinel project, a digital case-management system meant to replace outdated, paper-based processes, has been delayed again. The FBI's CIO and CTO bet big on using agile development to hasten the project's completion. But now performance issues have arisen in testing and deployment has been pushed out to May. It's the latest in a series of delays to build a replacement for the FBI's 17-year-old Automated Case Support system. In 2006, the FBI awarded Lockheed Martin a $305 million contract to lead development of Sentinel, but it took back control of the project in September 2010 amid delays and cost overruns. At the time, the FBI said it would finish Sentinel within 12 months, using agile development strategies."
Okay I turned it off. Chrome is working much bet.,,>.,>>
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
From Wikipedia on software development projects.
analysis of software project management failures has shown that the following are the most common causes:
Unrealistic or unarticulated project goals
Inaccurate estimates of needed resources
Badly defined system requirements
Poor reporting of the project's status
Unmanaged risks
Poor communication among customers, developers, and users
Use of immature technology
Inability to handle the project's complexity
Sloppy development practices
Poor project management
Stakeholder politics
Commercial pressures
Kind of missing the point of agile if you're 15 months in and haven't delivered anything. I mean, you can call it agile (you could also call it waterfall), but if you're not following agile practices, don't blame agile for the failure.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Which is worse, that the FBI waited 4 years to kick Lockheed off the project or that the FBI has regained control of unfinished software?
The worst is the realisation that the only thing saving us from law-enforcement totalitarian nirvana is institutional incompetence.
If they ever really get their shit together we are so screwed.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I think most Agile projects don't really do it the right way, if there is such a thing. People use it as a magic bullet. They're never "behind" in a project as long as the sprints are done on time. There's a whole cottage industry of Agile consultants who go out and get paid to screw up your company for you.
They still use a magic lasso lie detector machine invented by the writer of Wonder Woman and adopted by the FBI when their notoriusly corrupt leader J. Edgar Hoover was busy accepting kickbacks. Incompetence like that (unwillingness to fix obvious mistakes) is at the very core of their organisation and has made them an International laughing stock.
I've failed to find any Agile success story for a large project. All I find is marketing hype and buzzwords from vendors selling Agile training and mentoring services.
Agile is no silver bullet or golden hammer. It all seems a bit more like the Emperors New Clothes to me.
Like most such management fads, it is an attempt to capture the success of existing teams. The problem is, the successful teams were employing a great deal of experience and common sense in a flexible manner. That is, their one rule was "do the right thing". When you have an experienced and conscientious team that knows what "the right thing" is, and a management that's smart enough to stay out of their way, magic happens.
Alas, at the same time it gets a marketing name stamped on it, it is cast into a series of inflexible rules and chopped into sound bites for managers to spew back later. Rather than staying out of the way, management pesters incessantly to make sure everyone is doing exactly 'flavor of the week' exactly as they (mis-)interpret it. Nobody is even thinking about doing 'the right thing', they're too busy playing language lawyer with the magic juju manual that defines 'flavor of the week'. Meanwhile, the whole team forgets that 'flavor of the week' isn't actually the deliverable, it is supposedly just a means to get to the deliverable.
In it's most extreme form, a team infected with 'flavor of the week'-ism begins to eerily resemble a creepy cult complete with special meanings loaded onto common words and phrases and reverence to the leader (author of the book/consultant) and a group blindness for the whole herd of elephants in the room.