Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 241 posts

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#181

Post by AussieWog93 »

askvictor wrote: post #66

The government's system sounds just like the "Ultranet" (as it was comically named) in Victoria, Australia a few years back which similarly aimed to be the one system to rule them all in government schools. Eventually went to the scrapheap (along with a few bureaucrats who were charged for corruption). During the tender process a few of us were toying with putting in a tender using Moodle, but glad we didn't waste ou…

Ctrl-F'd for that exact phrase. I remember that system being introduced - I was in high school at the time and my mum was a teacher. It was down for the entirety of the single government-mandated training day, and when it finally came up everyone could tell from a mile off that it was a steaming pile of shit. I don't think we ever used it after the initial session, ever.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#182

Post by throw0101a »

johngalt wrote: post #7

It's amazing how often giant IT projects like these go off the rails. Exploding costs and garbage implementations. If you start the sentence with: "A 5+ year government IT project that cost over 100 million-" I already know how the story ends. How do we improve this common scenario? What are the root causes? The common themes are: 1. Lack of technical project competence at the decision maker level. 2. Scope creep. Wh…

> It's amazing how often giant IT projects like these go off the rails. Exploding costs and garbage implementations. If you start the sentence with: "A 5+ year government IT project that cost over 100 million-" I already know how the story ends.

People don't notice when things go right.

What about all the 5+ year, $100M projects you didn't hear about, because they never made the news, because the project went smoothly?

Even in general conversation we tend to vent about how bad our day/week was, and not how awesome something went:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#183

Post by jordanbeiber »

anvemaha wrote: post #179
johngalt wrote: post #7

It's amazing how often giant IT projects like these go off the rails. Exploding costs and garbage implementations. If you start the sentence with: "A 5+ year government IT project that cost over 100 million-" I already know how the story ends. How do we improve this common scenario? What are the root causes? The common themes are: 1. Lack of technical project competence at the decision maker level. 2. Scope creep. Wh…

In case anyone wants to read some research on the success rate of IT projects Standish Group's Chaos Reports are a good place to start. I read the 2014 one as a part of our project management uni course, but couldn't find it with a simple Google search so here's the 2015 one: [pdf] https://www.standishgroup.com/sample_research_files/CHAOSRep...

Many projects push technical debt and cut the wrong corners to stay on target.

It looks like a success until you ask operations and people maintaining the deliverable.

This is usually not factored in and ends up at at different cost center.

You almost never get the full picture of continuity when dealing with a project organization hence it’s really, really hard to judge.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#184

Post by reacharavindh »

mrweasel wrote: post #158
roncohen wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other problem here is that politicians are either oblivious or simple don't care about the cost associated with complexity in the laws. On top of that, the other unfortunate dynamic that exists is that politicians all work to get their little special case into new bills so they can point to that when their constituents ask how they influenced the new law. Taken together, the complexity of the law just accumulates…

I don't doubt that writing a new laws is complicated, but if I write code, and realise that I constantly need to tack on more code to handle special cases, then I will normally revisits my design. It is not my impression that politicians do the same with laws. One major issue, at least with Danish law makers, is that they want to target special groups, but that would be discriminating, so instead they attempt to targ…

It's crazy out here in DK. The most embarrassing example of such crazy targeted laws is the "hand shake with the mayor" requirement for new Danish citizens, clearly target at a certain ethnicity that would hesitate to do just that. The intent is to make it difficult to that ethnicity, the result is just a veiled law that makes them "appear" just enough secular and non-discriminatory.

There's a lot I love about life in Denmark. This is just to say that no place is perfect and DK also has stuff that all Danes should be rightly embarrassed about.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#185

Post by throw0101a »

globular-toast wrote: post #141
jordanbeiber wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Projects are necessary for things that are built to last and not change much during their lifetime: - a bridge - airplanes - most houses - etc Hardware comes to mind - it’s all hardware on the list, basically. Software (outside certain realms ofc) like this? I’ve been, like many others here, doing this software thing for 20+ years now. Big and small, I’ve basically never seen anything spawned from a project-driven or…

The trick is to make your projects tiny, not big. Instead of "build an all-encompassing system that does everything" you do "solve this very specific business problem". You could call these little projects sprints or something.

> The trick is to make your projects tiny, not big.

Gall's law:

> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.[9]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#186

Post by jordanbeiber »

bborud wrote: post #169
globular-toast wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is to make your projects tiny, not big. Instead of "build an all-encompassing system that does everything" you do "solve this very specific business problem". You could call these little projects sprints or something.

Oh, be careful. At my previous employer there was the concept of the "90 day sprint". Top management use the term without irony. All they have done is substitute "sprint" anywhere you would say "quarter". So now they are agile. I wish I was making this up.

Yeah, it’s not about what words you use, it’s about how you act and work.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#187

Post by OskarS »

aronatom wrote: post #82
a3n wrote: post #75

> You can understand why they arent keen to allow it to continue as its using BankID to authenticate. Would you install a 3rd party app to access your bank account? Isn't that how Mint works? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit_Mint

This 3rd party app in question ( mobilt bankid) is also used to access everything in Sweden ( taxes, banks, social security applications .. )

Also: as a Swede, I must say, it works very well. It is also a closed source thing, but unlike this Stockholm Stad system, it’s basically a success story from the end user perspective. It’s great to have a unified, secure and easy to use way to access your bank and government services.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#188

Post by daniellarusso »

johngalt wrote: post #7

It's amazing how often giant IT projects like these go off the rails. Exploding costs and garbage implementations. If you start the sentence with: "A 5+ year government IT project that cost over 100 million-" I already know how the story ends. How do we improve this common scenario? What are the root causes? The common themes are: 1. Lack of technical project competence at the decision maker level. 2. Scope creep. Wh…

This article and report was from awhile ago, but it was around only 1/3 of IT projects are completed ‘successfully’:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/study-68-percent-of-it-project...

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#189

Post by danjac »

peteretep wrote: post #53
johngalt wrote: post #7

It's amazing how often giant IT projects like these go off the rails. Exploding costs and garbage implementations. If you start the sentence with: "A 5+ year government IT project that cost over 100 million-" I already know how the story ends. How do we improve this common scenario? What are the root causes? The common themes are: 1. Lack of technical project competence at the decision maker level. 2. Scope creep. Wh…

Also internal company politics. What would fix much of this, for many projects, is a very experienced product person with final say over every feature, reporting directly to the CEO / board, and outranking everyone else in terms of decision making.

Sure, but people like that are expensive and make too much trouble.

How about we give you a 23-year old recent grad instead?

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#190

Post by danjac »

hutzlibu wrote: post #95
cromka wrote: post #51

"The city's local government, @Stockholmsstad, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars)" "@Stockholmsstad are now acting like angry toddlers." I'd read between the lines. I don't think it's a hurt ego, not with these numbers. Someone is (continued) to be paid for this to be happening. This reeks corruption.

Well, angry toddlers are also often angry when someone takes something they believe to be theirs. And toddlers often think the whole world is theirs and theirs alone and everyone is here for their amusement .. and if reality tells them different, they can get very mean, too. So - I think the analogue holds somewhat.

It's not so much angry toddlers, who at least can be placated with ice cream and a Pixar movie.

It's more government officials and contractors with their reputation and money on the line. In the case of government officials, it's not necessarily unmarked-bills-in-a-paper-bag-under-the-table kind of corruption, but the more pernicious "revolving door" of government/private industry kind.

Post reply on HN