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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

#371

Post by robomartin »

mdorazio wrote: post #52
didibus wrote: post #13

I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?

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…

Not to mention the terms in these kinds of contracts. The only way to deal with them is to charge enough to be protected. I have sold product (hardware) to places like the Navy Surface Warfare Center and White Sands Missile Test Range. If you are not careful you can come out losing in a big way.

For example, for each day/week/month you deliver past the estimated delivery date they discount 5% from your invoice. Sound like great motivation to deliver on time, right? Well, no, it's a guaranteed 100% (or whatever you can get away with) markup beyond what you would have charged because if anything goes wrong you'll go broke.

That said, this issue of super-expensive government websites done wrong feels all too common. You have to wonder how much cash we burn repeating the same mistakes.

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

#372

Post by thomasfl »

25 years ago, websites like this was seen as something of a novelty. They were made just as much as an experiment as something necessary. As a young web developer at that time, I often had to do all the programming, ux design and graphic design myself. There wasn`t any budget for more people. Full stack development wasn`t a thing yet. I still get amazed by how well staffed and funded web development projects have become. Web development has become more complicated too. More animations, accessability and higher security all adds up to making the whole project being more time consuming.

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

#373

Post by brundolf »

gunsch wrote: post #361
dopylitty wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a degree in software "engineering" and more than a decade of experience in the industry I'd gladly take a stable government job creating or maintaining important applications that help the government provide high quality and necessary services to people. I would take pride in working on such a system as a vaccine administration management platform. Instead those jobs are doled out to contracting firms…

There are government contractors who are doing this kind of work! There's a group of younger companies that grew up around the Healthcare.gov rescue and work in conjunction with USDS, trying to build cultures of better software development practices in government. Check out the companies in the Digital Services Coalition ( https://digitalservicescoalition.org/ ) and you'll see a lot of companies doing the kind of wor…

But why does it have to go through a contractor system at all? Why can't they keep developers on staff, who among other things can retain institutional knowledge?

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

#374

Post by imperfectcats »

nataz wrote: post #284
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…

Ha, I'm currently a federal government program manager, so I am thinking about it from the government's side right now. I've also been a consultant cog in a mega-corp and run my own small consulting business, so I've seen it from both sides. Tech folks underestimate non tech challenges (basically anything outside of their domain), and clients don't actually know what they want. It's an age old problem in lots of indu…

Made worse when you have lots of money and even more stakeholders.

Perhaps worst of all, when failure has no true cost, avoiding failure matters far less. The CDC won't go broke because they blew through $44 Mil. Most every other organisation would. That's one of the challenges of government, the lack of creative destruction.

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

#375

Post by Mountain_Skies »

eaton wrote: post #309
ethbr0 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much what I've learned doing 5+ years of big enterprise consulting (though not government). If the hardest / longest part of any project requires domain knowledge and personal relationships, then why are you outsourcing that part? I don't care if it's not a core competency / something you can do. Make it one.

One of the biggest challenges for large orgs is that the knowledge they need to do a given thing is almost always present inside the organization — but it's fragmented and scattered across different teams, roles, and balkanized administrative boundaries such that the big picture is almost never available. A high-quality consulting partner works to build the relationships and internal lines of communication that are n…

Though mostly about ladder climbing and relationship drama, the show 'House of Lies' has some really good scenes where the management consultants do actual work, which is pretty much portrayed as doing the things you've listed. Even as a fictional show, it made it easier for me to understand these situations and not get so flustered when encountering them.

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

#376

Post by hakfoo »

offtop5 wrote: post #200
brundolf wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: why doesn't the government have its own internal software development department at this point? One that's familiar with all the regulatory and bureaoucratic hurdles and the legacy systems, but doesn't have the incentive to grift. For the amount of money they spend on these contracts surely they could afford to pay competitive salaries?

For various reasons this wouldn't work, you have the various bands of government salary https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/01/more-top-career-e... >But for a GS-15, step 10 in Washington, his or her salary should total roughly $185,509 in 2020. But due to the federal pay ceiling, that same GS-15, step 10 in Washington will make the limit of $170,800 this year. And that's the absolute Max, after you go to the tro…

I hear this sort of objection for all sorts of civil-service employment.

TBH, I'm surprised we've never seen a proposal of the form "Federal employee salaries are not subject to income tax."

With a single line of legislation, that makes all federal job offers immediately 10-35% more competitive, without actually increasing salaries directly.

Once you get that as precedent, I could see it being used aggressively as a social tool: "We can't pay a public school teacher more than 60k, but we can pay them 60k tax-free, which is a little more competitive with a 75k private-sector position", for example.

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

#377

Post by [deleted] »

faramarz wrote: post #254
zaroth wrote: post #115

> Deloitte is the only contractor that can meet the project requirements, because configuration of the VAMS application is occurring using Deloitte’s propriety GovConnect platform. Therefore, no other contractor has rights or access to leverage the system to carry out O&M activities, such as the administration of the system, change and defect management and end user support. As the only contractor with the GovConnect…

Wow! the next article should be about who signed that contract!

[deleted]

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

#378

Post by acntr_employee »

eaton wrote: post #309
ethbr0 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much what I've learned doing 5+ years of big enterprise consulting (though not government). If the hardest / longest part of any project requires domain knowledge and personal relationships, then why are you outsourcing that part? I don't care if it's not a core competency / something you can do. Make it one.

One of the biggest challenges for large orgs is that the knowledge they need to do a given thing is almost always present inside the organization — but it's fragmented and scattered across different teams, roles, and balkanized administrative boundaries such that the big picture is almost never available. A high-quality consulting partner works to build the relationships and internal lines of communication that are n…

I can attest that the second modus operandi is the way long time contracts work from my experience.

Nearly every time all the knowledge and skills necessary are hidden and fragmented inside our client's org. With our access through all the management layers and silos we could work to fullfil the contract and also enable change within the client organisation and culture.

But why kill the golden goose? Our higher people' bonuses depend on us being the glue as someone else wrote in another comment. And a lot of my colleagues actually on the client's really do a great job in opening lines of communication. They work their a*es of to help the client.

Sadly helping isn't a monetary long term strategy for upper levels.

In the end

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

#379

Post by andreskytt »

rapnie wrote: post #362
ethbr0 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much what I've learned doing 5+ years of big enterprise consulting (though not government). If the hardest / longest part of any project requires domain knowledge and personal relationships, then why are you outsourcing that part? I don't care if it's not a core competency / something you can do. Make it one.

> then why are you outsourcing that part? To what extent is this due to neo-liberal "small government" policies, where from the highest political levels - through lobbying - it is decided that outsourcing is a win-win that leads to financial savings and budgets that are cut, and later on cut some more, etcetera? I've witnessed the crazy dance of enterprise consultants in large corporations (not government) and it is…

Complexity management is the name of the game. On all levels: functional, technical, organizational.
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