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CityTime was launched in 2003 at a budget of $63 million, but costs swelled dramatically as the project stumbled along for nearly a decade. From $63M to $600M? I would have thought that ppl may have noticed when the costs doubled or tripled the budget. Almost 10x the original budget? That type of oversight must go pretty high up.
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Timekeeping systems are actually extremely complicated. EXTREMELY sophisticated. The level of detail it takes to get one right is painstaking, and it is key to a city's survival. It's complex enough that you wouldn't understand it, nor would any auditor. For that reason, I just started a new startup company: TimeKeep NYC. We specialize in timekeeping software for NYC area cities. Looking for employees now, especially…
I'm curious, what are some of the complexities involved in a timekeeping system?
http://www.citylimits.org/news/article_print.cfm?article_id=... (article from 2005 when it was only 6x over budget)
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Great stories... ... it's just the article notes a subcontractor has already been convicted of fraud and kickbacks , so this might not have been a project quite like the projects you describe (though if this is a Terry Childs-type case, I'd love to hear about it).
Sorry, I meant to imply that that's just the way things are, however, after the realization that he'd been convicted, it's likely that whether he's done anything wrong on this particular project, he's drawn the scapegoat straw. I meant to say those things, but got lost in typing so much other nonsense and trailed off. Thanks for bringing it up.
They would bid on something if they weren't going to find a way to make more than what the original contract was for because in the bid wars they often lower the bids so much they have to recoup somehow. In this case they probably did not build the recoup method into the contract and did it illegally.
At least that's my theory.
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I've been on the wrong end of a couple of projects like this, and in my experience (not necessarily indicative of this case) the customer can be VERY at fault. I've been dragged into 'feature acceptance meetings' that literally dragged out for weeks when testing of a new chat component devolved into a days-long discussion on whether the graphic in the header (provided by the customer) was appropriate. The unspoken is…
Wow, sounds a lot like our university's tech overhaul, especially the single signon stuff.
CityTime was launched in 2003 at a budget of $63 million, but costs swelled dramatically as the project stumbled along for nearly a decade. From $63M to $600M? I would have thought that ppl may have noticed when the costs doubled or tripled the budget. Almost 10x the original budget? That type of oversight must go pretty high up.
How complicated must that piece of software have been for it to cost that much? For that kind of money it better be at least as complex as any OS out there.
my guess is most of the time was spent in analysis and consensus building being that it was for government. The code is surely atrocious
It's really easy to waste money on big development projects of this sort. The bigger the development team the harder it is to manage, the less well it is managed the less productive it is in aggregate, and thus the less productive it is per salary-dollar. And these are not small effects. A small team of very talented devs can quite easily compete head to head with a giant team of hundreds of devs, precisely because of these scaling and management problems.
CityTime was launched in 2003 at a budget of $63 million, but costs swelled dramatically as the project stumbled along for nearly a decade. From $63M to $600M? I would have thought that ppl may have noticed when the costs doubled or tripled the budget. Almost 10x the original budget? That type of oversight must go pretty high up.
CityTime was launched in 2003 at a budget of $63 million, but costs swelled dramatically as the project stumbled along for nearly a decade. From $63M to $600M? I would have thought that ppl may have noticed when the costs doubled or tripled the budget. Almost 10x the original budget? That type of oversight must go pretty high up.
I've been on the wrong end of a couple of projects like this, and in my experience (not necessarily indicative of this case) the customer can be VERY at fault. I've been dragged into 'feature acceptance meetings' that literally dragged out for weeks when testing of a new chat component devolved into a days-long discussion on whether the graphic in the header (provided by the customer) was appropriate. The unspoken is…
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Things like varying overtime rates depending on time of day, accumulated hours, whether it's a holiday, different rates for depending on specific work assignments, etc. It's not as simple as a flat rate x number of hours. But it's nothing that hasn't been done before, either.
At first I was like, "wow this would take me five minutes to program". Now it's looking like a solid 20 minutes.