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Social Security Administration Joins Other Agencies With $300M "IT Boondoggle"
alphadogg (971356) writes with news that the SSA has joined the long list of federal agencies with giant failed IT projects. From the article: "Six years ago the Social Security Administration embarked on an aggressive plan to replace outdated computer systems overwhelmed by a growing flood of disability claims. Nearly $300 million later, the new system is nowhere near ready and agency officials are struggling to salvage a project racked by delays and mismanagement, according to an internal report commissioned by the agency. In 2008, Social Security said the project was about two to three years from completion. Five years later, it was still two to three years from being done, according to the report by McKinsey and Co., a management consulting firm. Today, with the project still in the testing phase, the agency can't say when it will be completed or how much it will cost.
Legacy Systems are built with 40 years of code and modifications to meet every requirement the user needs.
Then you have 5 years to build something new and try to catch 40 years worth of rules and logic.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
These government agencies need to hire some developers for whom a few million hits is just another day. Something like girlsgonewild.com gets more traffic than healthcare.gov, and handles it with two well-configured commodity servers.
Until the vendors who are building this system get their company name in the headlines, the status quo will continue.
I've never heard of such a thing. Thank goodness Slashdot is here to challenge our preconceptions.
And, now they'll say it was all the fault of the contractor.
In reality, I suspect it's government infighting, poorly defined (and constantly changing) specs, and congress-critters trying to get a piece of the pie for their own districts.
They always blame the contractor but usually it's being managed by incompetent people without enough accountability and controls.
In fairness, I've seen a lot of legacy migrations fail, because it's often damned near impossible to understand the existing system well enough to write a replacement for it, and then you end up breaking everything which has been integrated with it for years.
I've been on a few large legacy replacement projects which fell squarely on their nose as the project progressed, largely because the system is vastly more complex than the initial analysis, and people make it impossible at every turn.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It would be interesting to know what % of this work was outsourced, or in-sourced, to foreign corporations/workers. Also, it would be interesting to know 1) how contracts for this work were let, and how they were monitored along the way; 2) what incentives for good work were included, or disincentives for bad work were included. Does anyone know?
How man of us have either seen commercials or heard about lawyers colluding with doctors to get people to claim "disability" with the SSA even when they have nothing wrong with them?
This is definitely one of those programs which needs heavy monitoring to weed out waste and fraud, along with military procurement.
True story along the same lines. My dad had to appear in court regarding a disability (non SSA) claim one of the company employees claimed they had and why they couldn't come back to work.
During testimony, a video was shown of this person, who claimed they injured their back, lifting bags of cement over his shoulder and climbing up a ladder to do work. Obviously his claims were rejected and he was fired, but I'm sure we can find thousands of people on SSA "disability" who are doing the same thing.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Contractors will give you two basic choices for contracts.
1. Pay for my time. Do what every you want, change what ever you want... but you pay for my time.
2. Specify the project in exact detail and the whole thing will get an over all bid to those specifications. Changes cost extra and may require an additional contract.
I'm assuming the government keeps going with option 1 and I'm thinking most of these issues would go away if they went with option 2.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The same thing happens in the private sector too. We just don't hear as much about it.
And, then contrast that to how much controls were on the people who oversaw it, how well they communicated/knew the requirements, how often they changed them, and how much political infighting they did.
I've been on several projects trying to replace legacy systems. And, as often as not, the client is fighting among themselves, the definitions are either never nailed down or are constantly shifting, and the people involved have no actual experience in managing large scale IT projects.
I'm more likely to think this is a management issue than an issue with who was doing the work.
Ask anybody who has been involved in such a project.
I was on one project that had 11 PMs (no, I'm not kidding), all with their own agenda, and no two of them could ever agree on anything.
It was a truly terrible experience. The people in charge of the existing technology didn't want change and actively sabotaged stuff. The various stakeholders were all trying to carve out their own little fiefdom, the users weren't consulted until late into the project, and the specs might as well have been written in smoke.
The people trying to actually build it were constantly being told "no, don't do that, do this" only to have someone else say "why the hell are you doing this when we told you to do that?". Heck, I've left a meeting one day where everybody said "OK, we agree to do this", only to have a directive come down a day later which said "we can't possibly do that".
Combine that with vastly complex legacy systems nobody really fully understands, because it's been hacked, extended, patched, and a zillion other things for a few decades and you end up with a complete mess.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, my money is on a failure of the owners of the project to actually take ownership and responsibility, instead of endlessly changing their mind and finding other people to blame. Documenting all of the bullshit becomes a full time job, because you need to CYA for when things go wrong later.
Some problems simply can't be fixed with good technical staff. Because the technical staff is just there to be yelled at and be scapegoats for management incompetence.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The reality is that governments - be it in defence or eslewhere - are always moving the goal posts, and the contractors are running to catch up. So in theory option 2 is the best, but it usually doesn't work out as well as it really ought to. The UK is currently playing the same game with a new system for welfare benefits, and it's equally disasterous. And remember - the private sector is often as bad, they usually get to bury their mistakes without publicity!
What are you talking about? Socialism?
It was Lockheed Martin that did this work.
A for profit company you know. Private business ALWAYS does it better right?
Good thing Lockheed Martin NEVER bungles a sweet Gov contract.
CEO got $25 million last YEAR for pay.. It's not like that is a significant portion of the wasted $300 million or anything.
That by the way was a raise.. Her pay doubled.
I mean, just because they waste millions of tax payers $$ every year does not mean that they should get poverty wages like little people.
Do you know how many pay offs, I mean donations they had to get to steal, I mean get awarded all that tax payer money??
I mean, think of all the time spent on the bribes, I mean sponsored outings, with policy makers!
It's hard work to drink all that booze and eat all that lobster!
Oh, wait, maybe you are just confusing crony capitalism and corruption with socialism.. Yea' maybe that is it.
Unlike Texas, where the state government employs thousands of programmers because they are so liberal. I just got out of a meeting with a bunch of government programmers from Texas. They'll all tell you the same thing - getting stuff done within red tape of a government agency takes them twice as long as long as it took them in the private sector jobs - unless there is a federal grant or contract involved, in which case it takes twenty times as long.
One project they did last year was for a federal government contract, for OSHA. They spent a year and a half developing the system, then during the beta test OSHA cancelled the project. This is after the feds had them write a system where it would print all the database records on paper, to be sent to the feds, who would manually enter it into a computer file, then send that file back to Texas, right back to the same agency who had sent it to them in the first place. That's about typical for the federal government. Government is one thing - it's supposed to be fair and deliberate, not far and efficient. The FEDERAL government is something else entirely.
I have worked for a number of government agencies and large contractors. This story does not surprise me in the least. What WOULD surprise me is to find a story where one of these large scale IT projects actually got completed on time and on budget. Now there's a story.
Probably a rehash for some but here is, in my opinion, the reasons these projects continue to fail:
1) The procurement and bidding process is flawed, particularly at the federal level. Many firms are forbidden to place bids on projects because that lack this or that credential. As a result, it's the same old players time and time again. IBM. Deloitte. Oracle. Honeywell. Lockheed Martin. Both the Democrats and Republicans know that it's broken and both of them have had a chance to fix it but don't.
2) Governments insist on doing "fixed bid" (i.e. flat rate) projects. In my experience, fixed bid projects almost always turn out poorly, Particularly for large scale projects. What ends up happening is that the project (for whatever reason) falls behind. But the deliverable dates stay the same. Eventually the contractor has to either go back and ask for more money, do the work at a loss, or start cutting corners.
3) Government managers, by and large, don't understand the concept of a budget. Often there are no consequences for finishing late or going over budget. They will still have a job tomorrow.
4) This one happens every time...you go into the project as 50/50 partners with a commitment from the client that they will devote X number of hours per week to the project and hold up their end. The problem is that the government managers have other stuff to do and can't devote X number of hours per week. If you're lucky you get X/2 hours per week. So critical decisions have to wait and delays occur.
5) For some government managers, big big projects are something they have no experience with. Last week they were trying to decide what color coffee maker to get for the break room. This week, they are installing SAP.
6) From the article..."It was supposed to replace 54 separate, antiquated computer systems used by state Social Security offices to process disability claims.". That is not a misprint. 54 antiquated systems. That is a huge undertaking. I would be willing to bet that at least a few of them have no documentation whatsoever. And the only person that knows how to run it retired a few years back. Good luck trying to unravel that mess.
7) The magic bullet theory. Time and time again I hear these management bozos (not just government ones either) spout off about how 'Software package X' is going to revolutionize how you do business..massive efficiency...streamlined processes. Bullshit. The software is only going to be as good as the decisions that are made along the way. And if you make mistakes on a few major decisions these really large software suites (SAP, etc.) can be nearly impossible to change once you start using them.
8) Team members that don't have a stake in the success of the project. Joe in accounting has been using the old antiquated system for the past 23 years. He's retiring in a few years. Do you really think that Joe wants to learn a brand new system? Not fucking likely. He won't get a raise or a bonus for all the extra work and he'll end up having to train his replacement. Meanwhile, his government manager has limited options for those that don't want to play.
9) Managers are unwilling, or unable, to change their convoluted business processes that are the root cause of these un-maintainable systems in the first place. Politics.
10) Lack of documentation. More than once I have been on projects where there is not a single page of documentation describing how the current systems works or what to do if something goes wrong. So you have to sit down and figure it all out yourself and that can take a lot of time.
Typical client exchange:
Me: "So tell me, why do you process Voucher payments in this fashion?"
Client: "Cause that's how Joe showed me to do it when he trained me."
Me: "And why di