671–680 of 688 posts
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If I asked our procurement team to get me a distributed version-control software to use I'd be given a site-wide license of Perforce before being given git. So enevitably requirements are tailored to what I want. It seems someone wanted Deloitte, why (and how expensive was the dinner) is another question.
Do you think one expensive dinner was all it took? ;-)
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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…
I worked at some government contractor a few years ago and one of the tasks I was given was to oversee the implementation of a ticketing system for a client. The basic requirements were for something slightly better than using an excel spreadsheet with basic search functionality. After a preliminary sales call with one well known vendor, they told us the next steps to implementing this system was to bring a consultan…
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I’m glad you’ve clarified as when you said that it sounded like you’re astonished at the level of apathy and/or incompetence you’re surrounded with and I was worried for a second that you’ve just too little experience to understand that your predecessors have very likely been trying for much of that time to push back against the status quo and have better ideas implemented, likely swimming upstream against resistance…
Is it just me, or are you being needlessly sarcastic here? The resistance is ridiculous, but it’s still the single most valuable thing we can be doing to improve our project delivery. Given the current division of people that care/not care (or are disinclined to act on it?). It is entirely likely that none of my predecessors did. That said, if they had been doing it (and made any progress), I really wonder what the p…
It's still an absurd situation, but I doubt very much it's the result of apathy - or at the very least the result of apathy from your direct predecessors.
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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…
And once a year as the government decides its budget you get to chew your nails as you wait to see if the money is in the next budget.
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I've been in technical, not management, consulting, but House of Lies felt disturbingly accurate. Except I usually just stared at bad movies in hotel rooms to decompress after dealing with clients, rather than blow and strippers. Sue me, I'm boring.
Heh. That stuff has always felt like an inexplicably weird trope, like Hackers-inspired visions of computer people as living Mondo 2000 articles. After 8 hours in a windowless conference room with a parade of stakeholders, making RACI matrices on a stained whiteboard and scarfing down cafeteria sandwiches during "bio-break," I want to _talk to my wife on the phone then stare blankly at the ceiling_, not go out for a…
Upvote just for this line of poetry. Mondo 2000, haven’t heard that name in decades.
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I’ve been working in enterprise/government sector for a few years now and my observation is that they need to focus on better systems design. Everything is too convoluted. Trying to make the software fit the poorly thought out and implemented legacy ERP design from yesteryear is where most of the money is wasted.
> Trying to make the software fit the poorly thought out and implemented legacy ERP design from yesteryear “We need a new system, but it has to function exactly like the old one.” Including any bugs and craziness.
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This should have been started at the beginning of the pandemic, if this was a rush job then that raises further incompetence questions
I mean it's certainly no secret that the US government suffered from incredible incompetence when it came to managing the pandemic. With that said, the start of the pandemic was ~1 year ago. Even if it started right then, 12 months for a country-wide, government-run IT project is a rush job.
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Nope. That's pretty much what the specs (written by outsourced consultants) said. In reality, there's one edge case where things needs to be applied in a different, distinct, and very specific order, otherwise (legal consequences).
Yeah, this is probably just my lack of context around the subject. That said, if I get requirements like that I always have a strong feeling the case can be generalized. Laws generally aren’t as specific as that.
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It's not that it reads like a Russian government contract, it reads a bit like any government contract. The problem here isn't even necessarily with the government: Had they gone with anyone else at a sane price tag, Deloitte would have sued that company to oblivion and the Government as well, probably for all sorts of IP issues.
> it reads a bit like any government contract. I can assure you that the GSA does not treat its construction contractors so preferentially. Lowest public bid wins, with preference to companies owned by service-disabled veterans, women, and minorities. I’ve never been directly contracted by the GSA, but I’ve been a sub for GSA projects several times. The closest you get to “one party fits the contract” are systems lik…
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Good people want to work at places with stock options and bonuses for good performance, the government can not offer that. Government is more suited for people interested in management, not pure technical people
Speaking as a technical person who worked for government, one of the most frustrating things was not pay, I am a simple man. What was frustrating was the GARBAGE tech we had to deal with. I'm talking 5+ year old windows versions, crap peripherals and desktops, shitty offices in ugly buildings, super intermittent connections to the data that always go down, throttled data-centers by incompetent SQL pulls (I was guilty…