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CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

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Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#311

Post by keanebean86 »

nataz wrote: post #226
mdorazio wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These contracts are generally bloated, but if you've never seen how a $10M+ contract for things like this works you're probably thinking about it wrong. The actual development piece is a pretty small portion of the overall work. The bulk of it is figuring out all the requirements, wrangling legacy systems and data into some kind of shape that can either be interfaced with or imported, documentation, support (includin…

This guy gets it. Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set. The intersection of domain expertise, contracting/procurement creativity, and technical evaluation is the tough part to wrangle. Getting to the point where development can start is 95% of the battle in my experience. Not to trivialize the actual development portion of the project, but most missteps happen early, dooming projects before a…

This is depressing but oh so true. I've worked at a few companies and they're all the same.

The business team schedules an hour meeting with the project manager once a week for two years to figure out the requirements.

I spend a sprint implementing the backend in parallel with a frontend person. We spend another sprint testing and fixing bugs.

Then the project sits in UAT for 6 months while the business suggests contradictory things.

Finally the project is shelved indefinitely due to budget issues.

Edit: fixed typo

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#312

Post by jpxk »

I just started reading 'Skin in the Game' by Nassim Taleb. These kind of overpriced consulting contracts, where nobody in particular bears the downside risk of incompetence, fit into his framework well. Hiring Deloitte et al usually amounts to outsourcing responsibility, except the people who do the work also bear little or no long-term responsibility if things go bad. A 3-person startup, on the other hand, suffers from severe downside (at least in a business sense) if they mess something like this up.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#313

Post by pulse7 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #308

I’ve done a lot of work for multiple national governments on multiple projects. There are two facts that can be true at the same time: - The government often grotesquely overpays for mediocre product delivered by vendors without holding them accountable in a meaningful way - The government process drives up costs to an insane level independent of implementor good faith efforts and strongly selects for companies good…

IBM was always good at understanding these "government processes", while Apple always struggled with them... and kept up with what they understand very good: consumer buying/selection processes... :-)

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#314

Post by manquer »

nataz wrote: post #226
mdorazio wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These contracts are generally bloated, but if you've never seen how a $10M+ contract for things like this works you're probably thinking about it wrong. The actual development piece is a pretty small portion of the overall work. The bulk of it is figuring out all the requirements, wrangling legacy systems and data into some kind of shape that can either be interfaced with or imported, documentation, support (includin…

This guy gets it. Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set. The intersection of domain expertise, contracting/procurement creativity, and technical evaluation is the tough part to wrangle. Getting to the point where development can start is 95% of the battle in my experience. Not to trivialize the actual development portion of the project, but most missteps happen early, dooming projects before a…

Yet that is the part that is broken now.

Sure all the requirement gathering and other costlier project parts can doom the success of the project because you built the wrong thing.

Here however the tech debt and bugs is why the project is abandoned

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#315

Post by futuretaint »

brokenkebab wrote: post #288
mdorazio wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These contracts are generally bloated, but if you've never seen how a $10M+ contract for things like this works you're probably thinking about it wrong. The actual development piece is a pretty small portion of the overall work. The bulk of it is figuring out all the requirements, wrangling legacy systems and data into some kind of shape that can either be interfaced with or imported, documentation, support (includin…

From the article it seems that they don't provide tech support neither to doctors, nor patients. And wrangling legacy systems in the field still may be worked out for much less money. The real problem is that requirements are written in such a way that very few (in this particular case just ONE) companies can satisfy, so essentially there's no competition - exactly a kind of situation which lets to pump up prices. An…

Why are they even building custom software at all if the target demographic is 70+ ? And why are they making senior citizens opt-in for an appointment ? its idiotic. They should have nationalized the browser/OS vendors to provide a solution, for free if its a national emergency.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#316

Post by cornel_io »

eckza wrote: post #263
nataz wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy gets it. Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set. The intersection of domain expertise, contracting/procurement creativity, and technical evaluation is the tough part to wrangle. Getting to the point where development can start is 95% of the battle in my experience. Not to trivialize the actual development portion of the project, but most missteps happen early, dooming projects before a…

> Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set. This is the single most important and insightful sentence that a lot of HN-ers are going to read today, and they don't even know it.

It also almost certainly applies to whatever every person here works on, no matter what industry you're in or how close to pure tech it is. In fact, I'm not sure I can think of a single field where even the most brutally difficult software tech problem is actually the difference between success and failure. It can be a prerequisite, and it can often be a bottleneck to iteration speed, but it's never the real problem, which is something SWEs need to understand in order to move up into leadership.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#317

Post by acdha »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #244
nataz wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy gets it. Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set. The intersection of domain expertise, contracting/procurement creativity, and technical evaluation is the tough part to wrangle. Getting to the point where development can start is 95% of the battle in my experience. Not to trivialize the actual development portion of the project, but most missteps happen early, dooming projects before a…

On engagements like these most billable hours are spent waiting on the client to make trivial decisions or give access to data/systems. Deloitte doesn’t usually hire dummies. IME it’s always the client being a total swamp creature. The high bill rate is for your pain and suffering from having to deal with them.

> Deloitte doesn’t usually hire dummies. IME it’s always the client being a total swamp creature.

This has not been my experience, which is really to say that the world is big enough that you can find any combination of blame imaginable somewhere. Once you have misaligned incentives no part of the dynamic can be relied on not to cause problems.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#318

Post by grey-area »

nataz wrote: post #226
mdorazio wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These contracts are generally bloated, but if you've never seen how a $10M+ contract for things like this works you're probably thinking about it wrong. The actual development piece is a pretty small portion of the overall work. The bulk of it is figuring out all the requirements, wrangling legacy systems and data into some kind of shape that can either be interfaced with or imported, documentation, support (includin…

This guy gets it. Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set. The intersection of domain expertise, contracting/procurement creativity, and technical evaluation is the tough part to wrangle. Getting to the point where development can start is 95% of the battle in my experience. Not to trivialize the actual development portion of the project, but most missteps happen early, dooming projects before a…

The project management part, which I agree is the hard bit, could be made tractable too. Other orgs manage this all the time and build sophisticated software which continues to improve.

This is a booking management system for appointments, the initial problem statement is trivial, the difficulties lie in interfacing with other systems, simplifying UI, getting data in and out, providing some customisation but not too much, etc. These are all things you don't know how to do till you start using it.

The process you describe of getting 'domain experts' in a room to decide on a spec without contact with the real users then throwing it over the wall to build is fundamentally broken. You won't get to even 50% done without real users - that's the problem, and it sounds like that's what happened here.

You simply can't build a system like this without frequent contact with real users (old people booking appointments, volunteers entering data in a hurry, pharmacies who need to add extra info for patients), experts on the other hand will often add negative value unless they are trying to use it.

If there was a will within the org commissioning the work to appoint one project lead and then get out of the way apart from demanding weekly builds from week 1 onward this would be tractable. Collect feedback from real users and deliver every week. This is not rocket science and a small team could and should do it if allowed the space to do so.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#319

Post by j45 »

fakedang wrote: post #285
eigenvector wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now think of the problem in reverse, from the government's side. Why are they contracting it out when all of the most difficult aspects involve integrating with government systems, policies and personnel - things that government already knows how to do? "Because we don't have the expertise to do software development." The comments in this thread, which I fully agree with by the way, just cement my belief that if gove…

Exactly. The UK in-housed their entire website IT team, and it's one of the best set of government websites I've seen worldwide, UX-wise and performance-wise.

If I recall correctly the UK digital govt is leveraging Camunda, which has some mindbendingly good pieces.

Camunda is not as well known in North America, it will be interesting to see what emerges in the digital transformation/rpa space.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#320

Post by petarb »

canofbars wrote: post #257
hntrader wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Obamacare website cost $2 billion according to a Bloomberg piece in 2014. Don't ask me how that's even possible.

Because governments outsource everything possible and end up with no persistent talent that really understands whats going on so you end up spending all the money on interfacing with contractors.

What if the government had an internal technology division to build things like this
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