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Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

arstechnica.com

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Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#91

Post by dennisgorelik »

incision wrote: post #76
lkrubner wrote: post #26

No one should allow a business or non-profit to face a situation like this. Only bad managers put something so important into such difficult circumstances. Why go live the day of the election? Are they insane? Unless the contract (to build this application) had some kind of clause like "This thing must work perfectly or all the money will be refunded" then this is a great contract to get. Let us consider this cynical…

>I wish I could land contracts like this one. Can you imagine building an app that the client will only need for 1 day, and you still get paid even if the thing does not work? The chance for fraud is huge. Who would even allow this? The people pitching this must have been some very talented salespeople... Anecdotally, this is exactly how large consultancies, particularly those who specialize in serving the public sec…

That explains what I saw on one of my past projects, including replacing PM, travel&per diem, and presenting failed projects as a good reference.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#92

Post by brown9-2 »

jongalloway2 wrote: post #87

This is an absolutely perfect use case for cloud hosting like Azure - dev local, test on a few small instances, scale up as needed on election day, then shut it down. From the article it sounds like they paid for eleven servers, which was significantly more expensive and lower powered.

This wouldn't have helped their training problem however - volunteers confused about how to find the site, not sure how to use it, etc.

Several dry runs and stress tests would have helped them alot.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#93

Post by modarts »

sliverstorm wrote: post #51
jvehent wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, people do get fired for buying microsoft. Switch industries and you'll see. Or try spending 2 years building your company knowledge base into sharepoint and you'll see.

Is sharepoint generally objectionable, or simply unsuited to certain environments/workloads/userbases?

SharePoint dev here. The problem is that Microsoft attempted to build the product to cover every environment/workload/userbase, and as a result fails pretty miserably at all of them.

-You want a CMS? Use SharePoint!

-How about site for delivering BI dashboards? Use SharePoint!

-Large, mostly static public facing site? Use SharePoint!

/Ugh

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#94

Post by pyoung »

sliverstorm wrote: post #51
jvehent wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, people do get fired for buying microsoft. Switch industries and you'll see. Or try spending 2 years building your company knowledge base into sharepoint and you'll see.

Is sharepoint generally objectionable, or simply unsuited to certain environments/workloads/userbases?

Generally Objectionable. I think it gets packaged with windows server and exchange server for free (or nearly free) which is probably the only reason people use it.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#95

Post by djt »

i find it interesting that they named it Orca as Obamas system was called Narwhal.

for those of you that dont know, Narwhal is an animal, but its also a internet meme. Obviously a very nerdy reference by Obamas team.

The fact that the Romney team had to name their software as a killer for a Narwhal goes to show that they wanted to win at any cost, unfortunately when that happens you sometimes lose sight of the goal, which in this case is to have a working system.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#97

Post by scarmig »

lifeguard wrote: post #6
eli wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Web App is actually the right call. It was for volunteers doing GOTV in the field, not as much for people sitting at a desktop. And you would want to be able to issue updates quickly and carefully control access -- things that are much more difficult with an App Store app.

Using Windows was a mistake, that's for sure. Good thing for Democrats they didn't know about the open source ushahidi platform.

NGP-VAN, which is probably the most important company in the Democratic sphere, uses a Microsoft stack. And it didn't lead to a spate of post-election recriminations about how its tech fell apart.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#98

Post by pyoung »

cobrausn wrote: post #54
meepmorp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't hire people with adequate management skills to assess risk and take proactive steps to mitigate problems before they become dangerous to the mission, that's a failure at the highest level. Someone should've see this coming, or Romney clearly doesn't know how to delegate responsibility well.

Now let's talk about Eric Holder, Obama, and a dead ATF agent. Something tells me you won't see it the same way.

There is a magnitude of difference between the two. When you run a top heavy campaign to get elected and a critical project fails miserably, that falls on you. When you preside over a government that consists of a large number of relatively autonomous agencies and departments, and something goes wrong deep inside one of them, that falls on the project managers and department heads.

To provide some scale, Romney's campaign employed approximately 500 staff. The Federal government employs more than 4 million.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#99

Post by lifeguard »

scarmig wrote: post #97
lifeguard wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Windows was a mistake, that's for sure. Good thing for Democrats they didn't know about the open source ushahidi platform.

NGP-VAN, which is probably the most important company in the Democratic sphere, uses a Microsoft stack. And it didn't lead to a spate of post-election recriminations about how its tech fell apart.

Using the MS stack for a situation where you will have huge spikes of activity on an app with an expected lifespan of less than 24 hours is not best practice.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#100

Post by smsm42 »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #66
smacktoward wrote: post #3

Orca had been conceived by two men—Romney's Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and the campaign's Political Director Rich Beeson... To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. This sounds like a lot of failed IT projects in large corporations -- dreamed up by upper management types who don't know anything about tech, then farmed out to consultants and tech…

And yet, despite this disaster, Mitt Romney’s campaign handed out more than $200,000 in bonuses last month to senior staffers, according to new disclosure records filed Thursday. Richard Beeson, Romney’s national political director, received a $37,500 payment on Aug. 31 in addition to his salary, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012…

Some people are volunteers, and some people work for money. I see no problem in somebody getting paid a bonus for good work, and not everybody on the campaign should be in it for pure politics. And yes, it is possible to do a good work and still not have your candidate elected. After all, only one candidate wins, that does not mean everybody on other candidate's team sucked.

The Orca thing was obviously an epic fail, but that doesn't mean other people didn't deserve bonuses - maybe their part of the job was just fine.

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