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California Cancels $208 Million IT Overhaul Halfway Through
g01d4 writes "According to the LA Times, 'California's computer problems, which have already cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, have mounted as state officials cut short work on a $208-million DMV technology overhaul that is only half done. The state has spent $135 million total on the overhaul so far. The state's contractor, HP Enterprise Services, has received nearly $50 million of the money spent on the project. Botello said the company will not receive the remaining $26 million in its contract. ... Last week, the controller's office fired the contractor responsible for a $371-million upgrade to the state's payroll system, citing a trial run filled with mishaps. More than $254 million has already been spent.' It's hard not to feel like the Tokyo man in the street watching the latest round of Godzilla the state vs. Rodan the big contractor."
And this is the state that has Silicon Valley...you would think there would be a lot of good expertise in the computing arena for the state to tap in to. However, in their defense, this happens constantly in the federal government too. So much money wasted...
I'm glad to see that they didn't fall prey too badly to the fallacy of sunk costs. Too many places wouldn't realize they've already lost the money they threw at the project, and no amount of extra spending in the hopes that it will eventually succeed will get that back.
Went as well as the last?
Rick B.
Perhaps they're planning on secession?
Wouldn't hurt my butt.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Umm, I thought the AC post was at least on topic since he used the word "too" in the title. Just sayin'.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
HP screwed over Vermont: http://governor.vermont.gov/newsroom-Vermont-HP-reach-DMV-settlement-gov-shumlin in its attempt to redo the VT DMV.
Of course, we end up paying for the incompetence that drives the grossly misnamed Department of Information and Innovation...
It's not about the government. It's all about the useless IT consulting companies. Pretty much every single flashy consulting company billboard/AD that you see at an airport is just a way to milk the gullible and not deliver. This is an across-the-board problem. Nobody wants to fucking do their jobs. The government thinks they don't need the right people to do it, so they hire a contractor. The contractor doesn't want to do the job either, it's not their core competency (nobody knows what it is anyway), so they hire subcontractors. Subcontractors have very little vested interest in anything, and they maybe deliver, maybe not, but due to multiple layers of clueless management, it's of no use anyway. So there you go.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
We see this all the time in the military. A low estimate is given on a minimally speced out project. Then as the project money is spent, the agencies go back to the congress and ask for more money, saying we already spent this money, and it won' really work the way we need it to. Instead of firing the con artists, and suing the contractors, and accepting the money as lost, we fund it more thus encouraging the fraudulent behavior.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Nothing to see here. No political corruption or fraud. Just move along people.
"The decision is a setback for the Department of Motor Vehicles, which has a history of such stumbles."
Oh you mean they've done this before? Well let's wait a few more months and then throw another few hundred million dollars at them. And of course a few million to our political and social friends.
"The DMV project began in 2006, according to the California Technology Agency. Instead of using 40-year-old, "dangerously antiquated technology," DMV staffers were supposed to get a modern, user-friendly system that minimized the risk of "catastrophic failure," according to a DMV report on the project."
Dangerous? Catastrophic failure? Were they running an old nuclear reactor at the DMV? Is this the automotive equivalent of the China Syndrome?
I just laugh at California's spending at this point. I'm glad I moved out of San Francisco as the taxes and living costs were insane. Glad to see that taxpayer waste hasn't changed much.
A lot of DMV workers just got new tech for their homes!
Maybe invest in a dictionary? The word "too" isn't just a random bunch of letters, it means something.
Was this stuff from the lowest bidder?
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
Pretty much sums it up.
I was going to use my mod points to mod up the first person who questioned the new math behind how a $208 million dollar project cancelled halfway through already cost $254 million dollars.
Alas, nobody had yet... and it's just about beer-o-clock here.
The Digital Sorceress
"The contract was awarded in 2007 to the Texas-based Electronic Data Systems. The company was later bought by Hewlett-Packard and renamed HP Enterprise Services. Hewlett-Packard is now run by Meg Whitman, who during her failed campaign for governor in 2010 promised to save California money with better computer technology."
I smell something going on here. I'm thinking this may have been a bit too convenient.
It's not perfect, but it works 90% of the time. It annoys me that cynics will often say private companies can do a better job and at a lower cost. Then when the govt. contracts the private sector out, then AGAIN it's the govt's fault for not being able to foresee embezzling.
How about criticizing the private sector for fucking things up?
contractors and sub contractors and lot's of overhead and have lot's of layers from the guys on the ground to the guys on the back end.
Also some people temp worker drag stuff out so they keep getting a pay check.
Yes, once more, all those COBOL programmers there must have an income. Who are you Mr. State to decide that you can just upgrade everything.
I thought it was an "emoticon" of a large breasted woman giving the finger.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This is California's way of creating jobs. There will be IT disaster, so California will have to hire IT staff to fix it. Not very economic, but at least we can create some useless jobs.
This is by far the best line of the article....
"Hewlett-Packard is now run by Meg Whitman, who during her failed campaign for governor in 2010 promised to save California money with better computer technology."
Okay, the system presumably has to handle about 30 million drivers and vehicle statistics, as well as other information such as traffic citations. I assume it's only accessed through a few hundred offices plus allow access to authorised systems (police etc) at any one time. Obviously it's got to be reasonably secure and perhaps operate at more than one site to cater for disaster recovery and redundancy. This is not beyond the capabilities of a few large servers to handle (I presume that cloud storage may be out due to security issues). Such a system could supply the information to Windows/Unix or even phone app clients. I assume driving licenses and vehicle ownership records have to be printed and sent from an office somewhere.
What else is in the scope of the project? Why does it cost several hundred million bucks to develop a new system? I can understand perhaps 10 million to develop and install. The biggest problem I can see is porting the data from the "40 year old antiquated system" to the new one. Someone must be able to explain where the extra £198 million has to go, apart from the contractors pockets.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
California of course is a behemoth of State agencies spread everywhere, not to mention hundreds more various County and Municipal agencies and departments. Just within the scope of the State of California there are massive agencies like the DMV, Health and Human Services (i.e., Welfare), State Parks, Department of Insurance, Franchise Tax Board, and dozens of regulatory agencies and sub-agencies, and the Legislature itself. Across these numerous agencies and departments there are hundreds of thousands of employees and a huge and frequently antiquated technological infrastructure. Most agencies are running independent IT silos and there's very little, if any, connectivity and coordination between these usually very large IT groups. In spite of all this for years the State's CIO was only in his position part-time (huh?) and, while he has since been replaced with a full-time CIO (probably a few times over, by now), none have been successful overhauling the State's horrific IT issues. The State's payroll system is among the most notorious in the nation and believed to be at least 30 years old and running on rock-solid but extremely EXTREMELY antiquated hardware. This is why certain mainframe programmers and administrators will NEVER lose their jobs - lifetime, guaranteed employment maintaining an archaic piece of hardware. It's so bad that when then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger threatened an across-the-board 20% pay cut to State workers to balance the budget (don't laugh; the State HAS to have a balanced budget but you know what it does? Never passes a budget or passes it 6-12 months after it was supposed to). State Controller John Chiang fired back, proclaiming the State's payroll system "couldn't handle" an across-the-board wage adjustment. Can you imagine? Over the last 10-15 years you're easily looking at billions thrown at overhauling California's ancient IT infrastructure, with likely tens if not hundreds of thousands of unique, probably very hard to support applications "vital" to its hundreds of State departments and agencies. The progress it has made with these billions? Save the overhaul of the HHS system - a huge, mega-hundred-million expense that was also fraught with major major problems - the State is showing no signs it is making serious progress to refine its systems and infrastructure.
This is entirely normal when you take a government that chronically under-staffs on IT and relies on consultants. They go and try to do something big, and they don't have the expertise in house to deal with it. Enter more consultants, particularly of the variety that like to write a lot of powerpoint presentations and bill a lot of hours but never actually deliver a bloody thing. Of course, since the government doesn't have enough IT expertise to actually figure that out, the high level senior managers that love powerpoint and high-level mumbo jumbo MBA talk think everything is going well.
And then, scope creep happens. It follows one of three lines:
1. Election happens. New government comes in, with new priorities and a new way they want to do things. This is obviously bad for a huge project in progress.
2. The existing project has a new department join in, which means new managers and thus a new set of demands. Instead of starting up a new project, they try to shoehorn those into the current project to satisfy management's desire for design by a giant committee of managers.
3. Someone realizes that the project didn't actually have all the requirements properly captured in the first place, which is pretty much inevitable in my experience.
You'd think at some point the government would learn that they can't manage projects in this way and rely on consultants to sort it out, but they never do. Of course, in the case of #1 or #2 even in house IT doesn't really save you, but in my experience they tend to be more flexible than a giant Enterprise consulting outfit (mostly because there's no contract they can hide behind to deliver X, even if X doesn't actually solve the problem that prompted the project in the first place).
The whole process is a giant mess.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
>95% of failed, past due or overbudget IT projects are a result of insufficient, incorrect or everchanging requirements from the customer organization and the people on our side who interface with them. It is a result of people thinking that computers are magic, large software projects are easy to change completely after they have been nearly completed, and people will understand what they mean instead of what they say.
obamacare is not contractor and it fixes a lot of stuff.
Also the obamacare exchanges are like new stores with more choice then in the past.
At least California knows when to let go of a deal gone south and fire someone.
Look, when you're an IT consultant company, your first job is to do a discovery project that is aimed precisely at defining exactly what the project is -- in absence of proper requirements. Heck, if it's a bidding process, you must also do due diligence -- that would typically involve talking to the customer(s), talking to their employees, etc. It's your own fault, as a consulting company, if you can't deliver. You must be able to tell that the customer is too clueless to make it work. It's your fucking job.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Nobody wants to fucking do their jobs.
That about sums it up right there.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Having worked on govt projects before, it's all spent on :
a) Management. Lots of it. About 5 times as many managers/sub-contract managers/advisors etc than there will be coders. Because the more management a project has, the harder it is to blame any one person.
b) Paper. Lots of paper. The amount of pages generated on specifications, revisions, reports, recommendations will be able 10 times the number of _lines_ of code created. All to show that no taxpayers money was wasted.
c) Tendering. It costs a lot to tender a bid, which reduces the competition to only the big ones who can afford to throw a million at a 1in5 chance. Whereas, if they were allowed to go to a small consultancy who only has 30 employees, they'd be able to get a much better price.
d) Changes. The requirements are often so written in very complex language that noone really understands it, and then they come along with changes every 2 months which require 3 months of recoding because they didn't fully understand what they were asking for to start with.
e) User acceptance. Don't underestimate the ability of a low level govt employee to refuse to use the new system because 'I've done it this way for 30 years and it worked just fine! This doesn't work like the old one did.'
Oh good grief what a bunch of bunk. Do you know why big contracting companies exist? It's because companies have lost faith in their internal organizations to deliver. Plain and simple. I've seen it in dozens of organizations in my career where an entrenched group builds a castle of "can't." So, the execs hire an outside firm not only to get what they want but to also force these little castles to actually deliver something. Lazy contractors? Please, how about lazy employees who feel that they hold the keys and as long as they keep pushing back and feel empowered so nobody is going to mess with their careers even though they may be doing such innovative things like writing System 360 Assembly Language. It's everywhere and it's not just in IT, people in this country have become lazy and foolish relying on attitude rather than customer service and trying to do a good job.
Every large organization has this problem and IT isn't just one of the areas where dead space can occur. So, the big companies come in, push change, make big promises that sometimes are overblown. In the case of California I could probably guess that the specifications of what were required were done by bureaucrats who have no clue on how to spec out requirements or were based on something that wasn't possible to build. Are there bad firms? yes, but are there bad customers? hell yes and they can make it absolutely impossible to deliver anything because the same people who have to approve or test anything are usually overworked, or not committed to the project leaving the contractor and subsequently the whole project in limbo. That usually leaves to failure despite the best efforts of all parties involved.
So before you blame consulting companies for this failure, remember they wouldn't exist if people were doing their job or came to the realization that their skills and abilities are out of alignment with what their management expects.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Seems the Government Pork-Barrel is sewn-up by the Multi-Nationals who are only interested in milking mega-buck projects for all they are worth rather than delivering a working product anywhere near their promised completion date and cost estimates. And the problem doesn't stop there, even if the project is completed, typically the Contractor continues to milk it via Support Contracts and added Consulting Fees. These Support Contracts can eat away substantially at the State Budget in the event of unforeseen issues or changing requirements resulting in upgrades.
As it stand, the current situation is not in the interests of the Government or the Tax Payer. It stands to reason that the Government could save substantial amounts of money on projects by building it's own IT Agency which could operate like CalTrans does by building and maintaining the needed infrastructure and hiring contractors where needed to perform task specific work and in a much more controlled capacity. Additionally, the smaller scope of work would open the door for smaller companies to come in and compete for these contracts since the man-power and support requirements of these limited-scope sub-projects would be far lower. Think Caltrans hiring a local Paving Contractor to come in and help repair a stretch of roadway in a pinch -- no need to bring in a big player, just someone who can bid low and deliver on time.
Of course, bringing something new in-house and running it brings in it's own set of challenges, but even a halfway decently run shop should be able to operate and deliver projects at a far lower cost than what they are paying now. I'm sure if they add up all the costs of IT Contracts for the next year, they'll see they are spending in excess of the entire operating budget of their Big-Name IT Contractor.
I'll never look at that word the same way again :)
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I am not a consulting company, no it is not my job to make other people do their job. You are blaming lazy developers, when you should be blaming lazy, fickle customers who are incapable of knowing what they want or need and change their mind every damn week, and then demand that you rework everything to meet whatever happens to be their fleeting fancy of the week. Even a good architect faced with that kind of BS that I see every day has a choice of submitting or telling them to go fuck themselves, and architects are rarely allowed to tell the customer to fuck off.
This. I hired a popular 'big' construction company to do some renovations on my business. They got as far as fucking everything up and then holding on to the money as long as possible. It took a lawsuit and a solid WEEK in civil court to get them to give ANY of the money back. Once they were court ordered to give the money back, they received extension after extension and after all was said and done, I had my money back and then had to shop for other people to do the work.
Guess what? Very few of them would even continue the conversation after they learned who my company was. So I sat there for three months without a physical location for my business, while the city told me over and over I had to do something with it. Only through extensive paperwork and documentation was I able to prove that I was pretty much blackballed from all the local construction companies. I ended up paying something like 3x the original cost (basically 3x more than market value) for the work.
So you're basically screwed. If you retaliate legally for them not doing their job JUST to end up with your money back, you get blackballed and no one will deal with you unless you pay them a ton more. If you don't retaliate legally, you've basically wasted the money. This is probably where they stand right now.
It didn't. $135 million dollars had been spent on it -- the $208 million number is in a different sentence, about a different $371 million project by a different state agency where the contractor was fired. Also note that "halfway through" doesn't mean that only half the allocated costs were consumed; indeed, costs outpacing progress very frequently one of the signals that lead to a project being cancelled.
Continually charging customers who are too clueless to EVER make it work is the business plan of pretty much every large IT consultant company.
For several large IT project at the State agency level, I can safely say that the bidding process for an RFP is to the lowest bidder, not the best bidder. Also they make it easier for certain companies to be on the bidding process ie. cronyism. So really the state ends up with what it asks for. Most large IT project fail because of these reasons.
It's not about the government. It's all about the useless IT consulting companies.
Funny, having worked with many consultants over the years my company hasn't had problems with them to this extent. If they were universally bad you'd think private companies would dump them. Which of course we do when they screw up. You're barking up the wrong tree. The problem is lax government oversite, its not thier money, they don't give a shit.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Agreed, but it's still a troll. Your post and my post are both -1 Offtopic.
Could it be that the way the government contracts are structured and micromanaged by government agencies is the problem and not the contractor or their programmers? I work for a company that provides government services under contract to the State of California and the government agency that oversees us micromanages us so much that it is often impossible to to develop systems properly. The 4 biggest problems I see are 1)constantly changing requirements that are written by government employees with little or no IT/web knowledge 2) contracts secured by being the lowest bidder which do not allow us to have the resources to properly design or test the system we are building 3) forcing us to work with other contractors including non-profit ones that are "donating" their services (very strange to me really) and that provide inferior IT systems we must use or integrate. 4) Requirements, features and design being dictated by government agencies or advocacy groups with little knoweldge of system design & development. For example, we are currently forced to support an application written by one of these "non-profits" that uses ASP classic and violates every current IT standard. My company has the IT staff & talent to completely rewrite the application but we are not allowed to and must instead support and integrate the badly written one that was donated to the state. It is unclear why this non-profit is allowed to force the agency & us to use their product, but it seems they have political connections that make it so. I believe also that government contracts almost always go to the lowest bidder and not the company with the most expertise. Often a contractor is the lowest bidder because they plan to cut corners and not follow good IT practices, or have not estimated costs correctly. Also as a web developer for a company that works under government contracts, I cannot count the number of times we have received requirements for a website from people that have little or no computer skills, let alone web skills or experience. You would think in this day and age that the government employees providing requirements for government IT systems would have at least basic IT knowledge, but this is often not the case. I am not exaggerating that I have received requirements from people that have no Excel, Word or even email skills and have obviously barely even used the Internet. Many people in the top levels of government management are older (baby boomers) or were promoted for reasons other than great IT skills. They often have no professional experience with developing IT Systems, ADA or other required standards and yet they are the one writing the criteria for the contracts and the system requirements. State agencies also often demand that large amounts of money be spent on "usability studies" or other commitees where a lot of people discuss and dictate what the IT contractor should do in building the new system. The people running these studies often have very poor IT skills themselves and have little experience designing IT systems, but they often have an enormous say in how the system is designed. By the time the IT contractor's development staff is involved in the project, everything is already specified by non-IT government people and between that and the contractor management trying to save every dime (therefore not providing resource for testing), it is not really possible to build a quality system. I say all of this inspite of the fact that the State of California actually has a good Department of Technology Services that provides great ADA compliant web templates. The California State government is so large that even with a good DTS department, the management and staff at specific agencies providing the requirements for a new system may have no knoweldge or interaction with that department and never involve them in creating the contract or project requirements. I think the solution to this is the state should be involving its DTS department in creating all contracts and requirements for new systems projects and ind
Bullshit. This is the typical lazy attitude the GP is talking about. If the customers don't know what they want, you teach them. Just doing what they initially say, and afterwards saying yourself "it was what you asked for," when it really wasn't, is EXACTLY the problem. Too lazy, or dumb, to see the bigger picture, and that is why you have the reputation you get. But that's okay, just blame the consumer.
No. You are not getting it. It doesn't matter how hard you try, they NEVER know what they want. It will change, and they will expect you to turn everything around. Often they expect you to do that without delays or additional costs, or both. You can teach them what they want, they may even agree for a short time, but not for long.
having done jobs that were sent to hp enterprise services > global regional subcontractor > north american subcontractor > regional coordinator > state coordinator > me, I concur. Even being competent doesn't matter. The whole system is screwed before it ever get to me. I often find problems I can't touch (not part of my portion of the contract pie) and sometimes I file a ticket when I find an issue and wait 2 weeks to be called back to fix it because the people that are supposed to be doing the monitoring don't.
Companies lost faith in their internal organizations? No, chicken shit unknowledgeable managers (not companies) don't want to take responsibility for doing anything more complex than a CRUD service, so they send it to Accenture and IBM. It is a big blame game and a web of CYAs.
d) Changes. The requirements are often so written in very complex language that noone really understands it, and then they come along with changes every 2 months which require 3 months of recoding because they didn't fully understand what they were asking for to start with.
With federal government projects, and I assume with state projects as well, there are all kinds of specific guidelines and rules that have to be followed. If these aren't stated explicitly in the proposal, they cause cost overruns. For example: Only union employees are allowed to move servers, equipment must be sourced from certain suppliers, certain technologies such as bluetooth aren't allowed in some government locations... The unwritten requirements can go on and on.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Perhaps California should consult with Virginia about how to contract and run a DMV system.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
What's the price of things remaining unfixed?
But no, the exchanges are not optional. A state running one itself is, if they don't, then the Federal government will provide one.
Mod parent up. We know the contractor has been fired - how many government employees got fired for this failure?
I think you've been reading too much fiction. The discovery and due diligence processes are there for the benefit of the customer, in order to make it appear that you know what you're doing with their project, even when their project is a mess - which is most of the time.
If you tell the customer that they are clueless, you probably lost the contract. So, you have to pussyfoot around and figure out how you can make any progress at all, despite the fact that your management, and their management are both fighting you every step of the way.
You probably believe in the ghost called Minority Shareholder Lawsuits too.
Oh, I see. It started under EDS auspices a few years back. Pretty light on details other than that, but let me guess, EDS proposed Citrix as a solution right out of the gate and set up the server on some 286 that they found in Ross Perot's attic. Am I getting warm? I'm pretty sure I'm getting warm, because EDS is a one-trick pony, and their trick sucks. Doesn't matter if you're setting up an accounting system or a next generation war ship, EDS will find SOME way to install Citrix on it. I'd say "and make it suck" but that's kind of redundant when you're talking about Citrix!
Too bad for the Government EDS is pretty much the only game in town if you need some IT contracting done. Enjoy your Citrix!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
And companies like HP, L3, Cisco, SAIC, and others, make Michelangelo look like my dog with a crayon.
"$371-million upgrade to the state's payroll system,"
What a bargain. Not. How many staff are on that payroll? Payroll isn't rocket science. Isn't there open source software that will do it? This is ridiculous, and I'm sure BROWN ENVELOPES (bribes) were involved.
The problem is that you are both right!
Just look at the new California high speed rail system and how it went from a simple concept to a bloated monster.
Both teams are screwing up and they will both blame the other team for the failure.
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
I work for a product design company. We work with (consult for) companies that want to bring a product to market but don't have the internal engineering expertise or capacity to do it themselves. There are a lot of companies like this. They employ some engineers to create specifications and make technical decisions, but not enough engineers to complete the project in a reasonable time.
I have trouble believing that a normal IT department is equipped to do a large-scale migration, especially when they need to continue supporting all their normal business operations.
In summary, if you want to be successful with a large software project--and large software projects aren't what your business does, you probably need outside help that does it routinely. Then the question becomes how you evaluate this outside help's qualifications, how you write your contract, how you set your milestones, and how you communicate your requirements. But that's an entirely different story.
or you can could hire a company not local. I live on Nantucket an island that feels like it's own country. Despite all local contractors (legal or not) a lot come from other parts or Massachusetts or out of state all the time. you don't have to hire local. I am surprised California did not get a company that makes accounting software already and have them tailor something that works for them or hire full time developer's that work to build that ever they need.
flamebait? hardly looks like flamebait to me.
Yes, but if you, as a politician, hire outside your electorate how are you going to translate massive government spending into your next reelection, campaign contributions, and your high-paying, post-political sinecure where you still wield influence on your political successors who want the same deal?
Ha! Answer *that* one, smart guy!
There are some cases also where this misalignment of skills and management expectations is more of a management deficiency. Many organizations have technical people who are quite willing and capable, but they have been pigeon-holed and beaten down by policies which incentivize apathy. I have worked with long-time developers in quasi-government jobs who have skills only on legacy systems, and I have had the pleasure of helping them participate in the development of modern SOA interfaces. Most of these people just need an opportunity to learn, grow, and feel like their contributions will be meaningful. And it is not expensive, in fact if it looks expensive you are doing it wrong! You don't need or want conventional "training" for them, and if it is done right, it can cost little or nothing in extra time. These people have a goldmine of lost productivity to tap into -- productivity that poor management has beaten out of them and that good management can cash in on.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
SImple rule of thumb: If it will take 5 good programmers more than a year to build it, don't bother. Really.
Sometimes the "castle of can't" is there because it really is an insurmountable barrier. I've experienced it personally. A certain person wanted me to find a way to piggyback data on packets. As you know, by design there isn't any reliable, legitimate way to do it. There was one company that had a *patented* way to do it with TCP sequence numbers, at the obvious risk of making you more vulnerable to MiM attacks.
A co-worker actually showed me an ad on craigslist that fit my job description. I held my ground because the request was literally impossible.
My replacement was not hired. Now obviously this isn't true in every case; but sometimes when you're employees tell you it can't be done, it's because it really can't be done.
Now that brings us to the PHB's problem. He's not a domain expert, so he doesn't know if he's asking for 2+2=5 or not. He brings in a consultant on additions who charges him more than salary, and eventually comes to the same conclusion... or builds him a broken addition machine to please him. Either way, it's a train wreck because the manager is fundamentally a conductor who can't read sheet music.
It's well known that a surprisingly high number of "technology projects" fail. Furthermore, the larger the project is, the more likely it is to fail. This is true in both public and private sector too. And many projects, while not outright failures are "challenged".
I would argue that information technology has succeeded against a nearly continuous background level of these failures. The reason is that failure is not a universal experience and the successes can be remarkable.
The creation of all of the following is, at least in some respect, a response to high project failure rates:
CMMI, PMI, Six Sigma, Agile, Xtreme Programming, Scrum, RAD, Lean
So why do projects fail? It's every reason you can think of! Just as a short list:
1). Lack of a committed business sponsor. Committed as in, if the project fails, the sponsor's career is badly damaged and they will probably lose their job;
2). Inadequate understanding of and preparation for the inevitable business process changes;
3). Insufficient project resources (too few people, too many junior people, competence problems, etc.);
4). A timeline that is unrealistic, usually determined by external priorities;
5). Poor scope control resulting in excessive project changes;
6). Toxic separation of IT and the business, due to culture differences, separate chains of command, or many other issues;
7). Immature technology;
8). Delivery cycles that are too long, resulting in failure to catch and correct problems early enough.
Well, that's just to get started. The consulting issue is a whole other conversation. Suffice it to say, consultants have their place and can be invaluable. However there are many reasons to use consultants and some are cynical and/or political.
Add in ever changing management that every time someone new comes in on either the government side or the contractor side, the things they want change. So you write a change order and someone claims that should have been in the original scope of work and then you go to the lawyers.
Been there, suffered from that. And in many cases it was the state that was at fault for lousy specs and poor control over their personnel and contracting types. Other times, it was the contractor.
I watched one system built on hardware the contractor told the customer would no longer be made/supported with 10 years warning still be in place 15 years later and 4 contractors later. Replicating something that took 10 years to build and which can change because some legislator wants it to while you are trying to replicate the logic of the old system is a bear. These aren't simple applets.
I wonder why states don't just ask for the best or breed used by another state (I once worked on the same relatively simple system for 8 states and territories. Each had to put their unique spin on doing the same job.) But that wouldn't respect the uniqueness of my state would it even for something as simple as a DMV system.
Problem 1: Sales team says yes to everything the customer wants.
Problem 2: The business managers think anything tech-related is trivial. Commoditized. Already been done before. Simple to implement.
Problem 3: Uncooperative government employees who don't want to be bothered or want to protect their little empire.
These are very difficult issues.
Re: Problem 1 - if our sales team doesn't nod eagerly at every requirement, someone else's team will. The customer can't tell if he's being lied to or not.
Re: Problem 2 - business managers like to look at things in the aggregate. BUT - the devil's in the details. And getting the right people is very difficult. You need a talented business manager to understand what what is complex, what is possible, what is impossible.
Re: Problem 3 - You have to find a way to circumvent many of the government employees / chieftains with this attitude. It requires buy-in from top management. But if it's a powerful sysadmin chieftain who doesn't want his empire f--ked with, well... you're going to need a full separate testbed on which to deploy and test the system. Hard to do if you're working almost totally on the client site.
But ultimately, to the business, it's about getting paid. And someone's been paid 100's of millions so far. So, from the business side, that would be considered a success. That's a problem too, if you're the customer trying to get a quality final product..
a good architect can tell a client to fuck off. You don't ask a building architect to change an office building's base structure halfway through girders going up, else you get the Citibank building in Manhattan (building would have fallen down in a good wind because some yutz wanted to cheap out on welds) , you don't tell the architect of a car (Lead engineer, whatever the fuck they are called) to change the engine and exterior, else you get Pontiac Aztec (was a great idea until pontiac execs fucked with the design) , and you don't change the requirements for software, else you get Windows Vista.
My experience is that the problem is too much govt. oversight. At least in my industry they don't say okay we need a system to do this, how much will it cost, how will you implement it, okay, that looks fine, now go ahead and do it! It's no I want it done this way, and then two weeks later I want it done that way, and then I want it totally changed to this, and now that.
The unethicalness of govt. contracting co.'s is in saying sure whatever to all of that, because they get paid all the same. I get paid all the same too, but I want to get something done. And so do my coworkers.
The problem is that for the govt. reps, it's not their money, they don't give a shit, and they're unaccountable so they don't have to. They can use it as an ego-stroking fest, because the contracting company will worship their every word as long as the funding spigot stays open. So none of the big-wigs in either party to the transaction care if anything ever gets done.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Cool story time...
Me and a coworker got sub-contracted out to troubleshoot this networking and programming problem this company was having with some remote DB access software. We get to site, we're showed what happens, and start looking into it. 5 hops to the remote DB, we see the third hop drop out in the frame cloud of the network route. Hey, it's a telecomm problem! Took us all of 5 minutes to solve their problem that they have been living with for 6 months because they couldn't figure it out. The company in question? GE!
I can only imagine what they got charged for it, as we were subbed out...
Please mod the parent up insightful, he makes an excellent point that managers everywhere would do well to understand.
Management should fire the "can-t do it attitude" internal staff and hire people willing and able to get the job done.
Well, a contractor experienced supporting a particular industry would find the processes in place and help the customer learn about what can be done to improve them. Most customers moving to new tech won't know what to implement, they just know things need to be more efficient. As a contractor it is up to you to NOT do what the customer tells you, but to convince them to use the best solution for the problem.
"If the customers don't know what they want, you teach them" - Umm...if the customer doesn't know what they want then the project is in deep and immediate trouble. It is the customers business to run and if they don't know what they want they had damn well better figure it out before they spend a boatload of money on a team of consultants.
I have worked on many large projects, some with government agencies some with large private companies, and the most successful ones have a common thread. The common thread is that the critical project decisions are a collaborative effort, not simply punted to the consultants to say "here, you figure it out". If a company has management that is unwilling or unable to make decisions that company will fail. I don't care how many consultants you bring in, if the management cannot articulate how the business is currently run and what the future goals are the project will fail.
Are there shitty consultants out there? Sure. Just like there are company executives that have no business running a lemonade stand, never mind a multi-billion dollar company or large government office. To succeed you need talent on both sides.
Some of the government IT systems that I have been exposed to are arcane, to say the least. Often they have little or no documentation and are extremely complex. Many of the agencies are under funded and under staffed. Talent and motivation, frankly, are sometimes lacking. Basically it's a difficult environment to work in.
Really big projects like this have a high failure rate. There are a multitude of reasons, some of them above. I suspect that both sides share in the blame.
>95% of failed, past due or overbudget IT projects are a result of insufficient, incorrect or everchanging requirements from the customer organization and the people on our side who interface with them.
Bingo.
The customer organization is multiple organizations, all with different agendas, some of which are surely to scuttle the project. Each organization is made of multiple people who come and go over time, with each new regime reevaluating and changing direction.
One of the sweet dynamics is not just that the government changes requirements - every new Eloi administration does that. But the morlocks in government who are actually in the know about the details don't want to tell you, because their butts are on the line only if they commit to a big mistake, and not if they accomplish nothing.
Of course the government contracting business is a racket of greasing the government players. But the contractors really would prefer to build something that works.
Well exactly, in the UK nearly every large system that the Civil Service commissions [from recent memory Child Support Agency, Crown Prosecution Service, Tax Credits, National Health data spine, Secure email for National Health, various bits of HMRC [our taxation department for overseas readers]] has failed, been delivered over-cost and late or abandoned.
Incidentally on the consultancy side, the same 'usual suspects' EDS, Cap-Gemini and Accenture, for example, tend to be involved nearly every time.
However senior Civil Servants stay in post and, indeed, go on to greater things and usually end up with decorations and honours. Before in the days of high Dickensian stools, quill pens and Latin phrases, the time that the Civil Service still live in, it mattered somewhat less. Now that modern society is highly technology-based, this really, really, really has to stop.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
No. You are not getting it. It doesn't matter how hard you try, they NEVER know what they want.
It's worse than that.
The only people who tell you what they want are the know nothing fly by night management Eloi who plan to be elsewhere long before the collapse.
The government morlocks who actually know what they're talking about don't want to tell you - they don't want to be automated out of their positions, they don't want to lose their power, they don't want electronic trails of their activities, and they know that they never be blamed if they do nothing - only those who act get in trouble.
Of course an IT shop has never heard of hiring a psychologist or two. Man, in business you have to manipulate your customers sometimes, I think you'd have known it by now. Sometimes it even takes experts to do such manipulation. A big IT consulting shop has resources to pull it off without thinking much, so to speak. It's not always about technology, but that doesn't mean it's out of your control.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The problem is that the process you outline
a) takes longer
b) costs more
at least as described at the initial planning stages
And those two aspects are of paramount importance in public situations. Typically, they've screwed around so long that the system you are trying to replace/upgrade/fix is WAY behind the current state of the art, so you're not updating a 5-10 year old implementation.. no, you're looking at something that was designed in 1975 with System/360 as the back end for 3270 terminals, which has had some incremental upgrades over the years: IBM PCs as 3270 emulators; replacing the BiSync comms with Ethernet; swapping out the S/360 for an AS/400, etc.etc.etc.
So everyone is quite literally desperate for replacement, and, of course, your piecemeal implementation strategy depends on there being adequate documentation and description of the existing system and its interfaces, which doesn't exist. And IT gods forbid that you're replacing a partially automated, partially manual paper system. The documentation for the paper system doesn't exist, nor is it implemented consistently, because it depends on the knowledge of how Martha in processing handles form 324/Y/2. She learned from Rose, her supervisor back in 1983 the way to actually handle 300 a day of those forms which is how many she gets, instead of the planned 30 a day when the system was created.
So the big bang upgrade is really the best of a bad lot of alternatives.
obamba care fixes nothing, and just injects more money into the positive feedback loop of rising insurance, healthcare, and big pharmy costs. what idiots our lawmakers were, to sign it without reading it or comphrehending it (to quote the lobotomite Pelosi "we have to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it!")
I hereby submit my $100M proposal to undertake an overhaul of the California DMV system, which will only cost $50M total when the state has to cut it short. Send your check now so the savings can start sooner!
So they hired HP to design a system that would cut union jobs. What could possibly go wrong?
There are some cases also where this misalignment of skills and management expectations is more of a management deficiency. Many organizations have technical people who are quite willing and capable, but they have been pigeon-holed and beaten down by policies which incentivize apathy.
I've seen just this more than once. Eg., I once interviewed with AMR / American Airlines in Tulsa for a sysadmin job. They had me sit for an hour filling out an anachronistic scantron-type application then did semi-normal interview stuff. I was told that there was a corporate policy against using free software -- which would make it kinda hard to edit files. At the end they offered me a job at the lower extreme of my indicated acceptable salary range while effusing how much they liked me -- "working with make and SCCS". SCCS? Seriously? I had to imagine that it was a place where souls and will-to-live both vanished quickly.
a good architect can tell a client to fuck off
Bingo!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
If your management is fighting you, you have already lost the battle -- you're working for the wrong bosses. As for their management: that's why you hire the right people who can set the customer straight while the customer is thinking all the time that they are in charge. Manipulating career bureaucrats is easy -- they are all the same, after all. You only need those who know how to pull it off working for you. That's all. I've heard first hand from a small European consulting company that undertook a few out of the view but significant projects, and they had two psychologists on staff -- one specializing in negotiations and another one specializing in profiling. I think a couple private investigators were also temporarily retained to figure out the exact political pressures in play. A couple weeks into the bid review process they had a pretty good handle about the personalities of all the key people who they were interfacing with on the customer end, and the bosses above those people. The competitors didn't even stand a chance.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
So, you don't fix the internal inept employee problem, but instead hire an external contractor? LOL. No wonder it's all downhill from there.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Piggybacking data on packets being an insurmountable problem? Huh? I don't know the specifics, but tunneling and encapsulation come to mind, and are relatively trivial to implement in most cases.
I do understand what you're after, of course -- sometimes the requests just don't make any sense.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I have a bachelors of science in business but I have no management responsibilities where I work. I am currently pursuing a masters in psychology so the menial labor I get paid to do allows me to stay focused on school. The way I see uneducated managers is like how you might imagine the experience of riding on a bus driven by an unlicensed spoiled brat. That's the way organizations are managed where decision-makers do everything they can to appear superior by comparison. Do they care about the performance of the organization? Why should they when demand is legally protected or when any failure can be pinned on something or someone else? Anyway, thank you for pointing out that organizations have the human capital necessary but decision makers refuse, for one reason or another, to recognize it as an opportunity to improve the organization.
You've heard of SWOTT analysis? Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunity, Trends and Threats from inside the organization and outside the organization are analyzed. Turns out the decision-makers (the few of them who actually do a SWOTT analysis for their organization) parse the off-spec of the organization's human capital as a threat instead of opportunity.
There are some cases also where this misalignment of skills and management expectations is more of a management deficiency. Many organizations have technical people who are quite willing and capable, but they have been pigeon-holed and beaten down by policies which incentivize apathy. I have worked with long-time developers in quasi-government jobs who have skills only on legacy systems, and I have had the pleasure of helping them participate in the development of modern SOA interfaces. Most of these people just need an opportunity to learn, grow, and feel like their contributions will be meaningful. And it is not expensive, in fact if it looks expensive you are doing it wrong! You don't need or want conventional "training" for them, and if it is done right, it can cost little or nothing in extra time. These people have a goldmine of lost productivity to tap into -- productivity that poor management has beaten out of them and that good management can cash in on.
Government workers have very strong unions and it is often easier to go around them thab through them. Fitting for our passive aggressive form of government.
Hapless management. Sad, really.
As I said, I think you're reading too much fiction.
Bids are generally awarded (in the USA) to companies that have contributed to political campaigns. After all, they expect something in return for their funding of candidates.
I agree. GP was spot on. As a follow up to the parent, I suggest the book Leading Geeks. Geeks are a different breed of people and can't be managed "the typical way". This book explains to managers how to get geeks to contribute to an organization. My friend, who is a manager, recommended I read the book. I'm not a manager, but it had me pretty well pegged and if managers understood how to manage me, everyone (me, managers, clients) would be very happy.
what idiots our lawmakers were, to sign it without reading it or comphrehending it (to quote the lobotomite Pelosi "we have to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it!")
This is one of the biggest problems with any law passed by any federal law maker -- no matter what side of the spectrum you're on. With all of the legislation they pass every year, it is impossible for any person to read (let alone have time to comprehend) everything that is voted on.
This. This. This.
There is also a ton of requirements that many would not need to do like PIA and TRA. FOI requirements, etc... Also funding is usualy bonkers, where you waste a lot simply trying to fingure out how to do a multi year project using annual allotments, which change annually. Changes driven by managers that either don't understand the buisness or want to change it during the middle of the project (or need to for political reasons). The having to more less pick the lowest bidder regardless if you don't think they are the best choice for the job is likely another issue. More taxpayer money is wasted ensuring taxpayer money isn't being wasted. It has always boggeled my mind that rather than punish the few instances of people cheating the system, they put a blanket policy down on everyone to ensure "this never happens again", the end result being that it costs more and takes longer to do anything. Then you have the fact that every couple of years the political landscape changes, and your project may not be a priority anymore. Anyway, it canbe a frustrating process to say the least. Also those cost values get hugly inflated by the fact that just about everything is contracted out. Typically government workers of this type have been gutted one way or another. Consultants know this, and charge 600$ an hour. To say they see government contracts as juicy teats is an understatement. All the prices and costs will be inflated, even vendoring it out to maybe the 5 companies that could do it. Then once they get the contract, they will use all the above to further change the costing structure (some legit) to have those explosive numbers.