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IBM contract cost for failure-plagued Phoenix payroll system jumped to $185M

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Re: IBM contract cost for failure-plagued Phoenix payroll system jumped to $185M

#71

Post by otakucode »

Frondo wrote: post #59
dastbe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the major problems (at least in the US) is that the process is heavyweight and specifically tuned towards "lowest conforming bid". You end up getting subpar work and long delays, but the government is absolutely unwilling to restart the process in almost all cases because the cost is just that large (and we picked this one because it was going to be the lowest cost!). In some ways, the government has very litt…

The "lowest bid" thing is actually now starting to change. Government buyers are starting to get trained--and there is an accompanying culture shift--on the idea of best value, which is a combination of price, timeliness, ability to deliver, and whatever other factors actually contribute to money not being wasted. It's stupid that for so long it's been coded into law that you need to spend as little as possible, beca…

Still the problem is that when Lockheed Martin rolls in with a $350million bid, Boeing comes in with a $365 million bid, and Joe Schmoe's Web Shop shows up with a $450k bid, they dismiss Joe Schmoe as trivially worthless despite the fact he's got low overhead, had built systems exactly like what they need, and could do it quickly. LM and Boeing, on the other hand, are bumbling fools, giant towering piles of middle managers and upper managers and the worst examples of bureaucracy you'll ever face. The kind of people who if faced with a situation where the company has already been paid but the work location is going to get shut down for a day they will try to trick workers into taking their own vacation time to cover it, simply conveniently not mentioning that the time will be paid anyway. Sure you could just be decent, but if there's a chance to gouge, GOUGE AWAY. But they look 'respectable'. I've seen a billion-dollar contract where they found an off-the-shelf product that did exactly what they wanted... so they bought it, gutted it, and rebuilt it more terrible than ever in order to justify the expense. I've been on one side saying 'you guys will mess it up, just let us develop the new version' and been told 'you can do it... but you still have to pay US for writing it. Because that's part of the contract we won and we'll sue you to death otherwise.'

Re: IBM contract cost for failure-plagued Phoenix payroll system jumped to $185M

#72

Post by aianus »

barkingcat wrote: post #12
lph wrote: post #8

Mind boggling. What could possibly be so complicated about a payroll system? Does anyone here have insight into this problem space?

Differences in legal rules across jurisdictions, taxes, benefits, and contractual differences from person to person Some of the things I know of. Probably a ton other exceptions. My main takeaway is that payroll deals with people on a highly individual and highly impactful way. This is not ordering a taxi. This is stuff to do with whether you have dinner on the table or whether you can pay for your daughter's life-sa…

While getting payroll correct is definitely complex, not paying people at all is an unforgivable and inexplicable failure mode.

Re: IBM contract cost for failure-plagued Phoenix payroll system jumped to $185M

#73

Post by adekok »

user5994461 wrote: post #63
pcurve wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" A $1.54-million contract for a new content management system, where all government websites would be moved, was awarded to Adobe in 2015." If government officials thought that a project of that scale can be done for $1.54 million by a company size of Adobe, then clearly they were negligent in their duty. It can be done by much smaller group of talented developers in couple years, but I'd imagine it would still cost…

I find your message confusing. Are you saying that this is way too much or way too little? Because 1 million is pocket change for a government project. It barely pays a couple of people for the year.

1.5M for a content-manageable system used by a government is way too low. As in, whoever agreed to that was incompetent.

Re: IBM contract cost for failure-plagued Phoenix payroll system jumped to $185M

#74

Post by adekok »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #60

IT horror stories involving IBM don't really surprise me anymore. I'm more surprised by the companies and governments they continue to game with their low ball bid tactics. I once worked with a large team from IBM that was staffed with Indians that did the work both onsite and offshore in India and it was without a doubt the worst code quality I've ever seen in my career. There were classes with 10,000+ LOC, methods…

I've seen large companies do the same.

Testing? Pfft.. that's for losers.

Design specs? Same answer.

Apparently if you spend enough on sales, you can sell utter shit to unsuspecting customers. Then, you beat up the engineering team to fix all of the bugs that the customers report.

Re: IBM contract cost for failure-plagued Phoenix payroll system jumped to $185M

#75

Post by emerongi »

mrweasel wrote: post #35

>IBM Canada was the only company to bid on the government's pay modernization project If only ONE company bid on your project, then you honestly need to rethink it. Does the government really believe that IBM was the only company interested? Any project that only receive one bid should be cancelled and rethought. If your payroll regulation is so complex that only one company wants to bid, then maybe you should addres…

It's not unusual for governments to create such project requirements that only one or two companies can bid on it. The "winning" company is known long before.

Happens in all sectors.

Re: IBM contract cost for failure-plagued Phoenix payroll system jumped to $185M

#77

Post by thisisit »

While we might want to talk about fallacies of a government contract, the reality is, well even software companies fall for it. Without giving much away, my ex-employer a fairly large "product" company wanted to implement a system from Peoplesoft's competitor.

The management wanted to save cost which meant neither full time employee (FTE) were hired nor retrained. So they brought in IBM consultants.

Once the project was over IBM left only for the company to realize they had no one to make incremental changes to the system or maintain it.

They spent extra money to hire another developer and consultancy to maintain the system.

Takeaways: a. This was not the first time IBM had delivered shoddy product but "low cost" was a driving factor so they get hired again and again. This is true for both private companies and government.

b. Low cost also means companies don't want to hire FTEs rather make do with contractors. This creates dependency.

c. It is not entirely on IBM or other consultancies but general ineptness too. People holding on to their jobs, hiring and creating messes:

During the development of the aforementioned project one of the workflows fell within my team's domain. But the finance team had some "developers" who wanted to justify their salaries. They wanted to develop but had zero understanding of what do words like "standards" and "best practices" meant. I spent hours and hours arguing over why certain things should be done in a certain way. I was always told I was too uptight.

In the end of module written by these "developers":

a. Transmits salary for the whole company via plain text files

b. If a, was not enough the text file is emailed to 60-70 people in the company who have no authorization to look at salary data. It is always maintained that without sufficient background people might not understand the salary data at all because it uses "employee ids" instead of names.

So not everything was IBM's fault on the project.

Currently, the salary in text is a huge security risk but no one cares. All our efforts to write a program to obfuscate data was rejected for being "too complex".

Re: IBM contract cost for failure-plagued Phoenix payroll system jumped to $185M

#78

Post by BoorishBears »

user5994461 wrote: post #68
Nelson69 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the perfect place to "confess" to something that happened to me, fresh out of college, at my first full time real job at IBM... 1996ish I got paid for 2 weeks on my first pay check but I was technically on the job for 3 days. I thought about it, biggest paycheck I had ever had in my entire life at that point, and I decided to do the honest thing and tell my manager. He thanked me, made some calls, did whateve…

It's not free pay. Your salary accounts for the empty times when there isn't a client project to assign you to. When you do work, you are billed much higher than the pay you get.

I read it as a glitch that gave him 2 weeks of pay (1 full pay period) after starting 3 days before pay day.

Re: IBM contract cost for failure-plagued Phoenix payroll system jumped to $185M

#79

Post by Roritharr »

microcolonel wrote: post #66
throwaway_45 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't Canada put a rule saying all work must be done by Canadians. Even if its cheaper keeping the money in country seems better than sending it to India.

> Why doesn't Canada put a rule saying all work must be done by Canadians. Because the government doesn't want to be seen as xenophobic. One of the major talking points of the prime minister and his government is "diversity is our strength". They also may want (depending on the department) to be seen as distancing themselves from expenses, not necessarily engaging in cost savings per se, but in cost-saving-style beha…

> The problem with government in Canada is apathy. Nobody, and I mean nobody, cares at all about Canada as an ideal or concept; nobody really cares all that much about their fellow Canadians.

It feels the same in Germany, if i had to guess i'd say most western countries are going through something like this at the moment.

Re: IBM contract cost for failure-plagued Phoenix payroll system jumped to $185M

#80

Post by microcolonel »

Roritharr wrote: post #79
microcolonel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why doesn't Canada put a rule saying all work must be done by Canadians. Because the government doesn't want to be seen as xenophobic. One of the major talking points of the prime minister and his government is "diversity is our strength". They also may want (depending on the department) to be seen as distancing themselves from expenses, not necessarily engaging in cost savings per se, but in cost-saving-style beha…

> The problem with government in Canada is apathy. Nobody, and I mean nobody, cares at all about Canada as an ideal or concept; nobody really cares all that much about their fellow Canadians. It feels the same in Germany, if i had to guess i'd say most western countries are going through something like this at the moment.

> It feels the same in Germany, if i had to guess i'd say most western countries are going through something like this at the moment.

Yeah, that's what I think I'm seeing too. When I talk with my fellow Canadians, especially those who grew up here, they say things like "we don't have a culture"; I get a similar vibe from visiting Germans, and even (to a lesser extent) some less-patriotic Americans.

It's like the west simultaneously forgot that their greatest cultural artifact is their societies. Western society is very, very different from how people lived before, and I'd say for the better, but there seems to be a taboo on taking pride in it.

I tend to get along well with the parents of second gen. Canadians. The parents seem to know why they came here more than native-born Canadians know they want to stay.

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