Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
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Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
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Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#2It's possible to infer from this that CA ordered an output from IBM, rather than an outcome.
IBM can claim that they have indeed delivered the thing that was ordered, while CA remain disappointed that the effect they had in mind is missing.
In Canada's defense though, it's sometimes hard to find someone who will even take on contracts of this magnitude. Getting good terms, even more so.
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#3The name is just too perfect: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine...
To that point, I’m wondering if all IT initiatives codenamed “Phoenix” are doomed from the start, given that the implication is “let’s burn down everything we have that works, and rise anew from the ashes”...
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#4The comments made about the government about excluding IBM from making future systems for the government stood out.
The reality is payroll should be executed by payroll specialists. I recently had to research payroll providers and there are players who service 20-30% of the Canadian population already.
This is another sign of folks not knowing how to source, design, oversee or implement software implementations.
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#5and that's why governments should hire software engineers that can be in the loop and understand not only the technical but the policy side. Hiring an army of contractors earning 300k/year to deliver "something" in the waterfall model is a recipe for disaster.
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#6The name is just too perfect: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine... To that point, I’m wondering if all IT initiatives codenamed “Phoenix” are doomed from the start, given that the implication is “let’s burn down everything we have that works, and rise anew from the ashes”...
Hah! I make this joke all the time with friends. I have literally been on three different failed projects named ‘Phoenix’
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#7I hope to someday read a comprehensive post-mortem but I doubt there's anyone involved who can/would write one without a lot of bias against the other parties involved. This will go down in an annals of massive software project failures.
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#8It's possible to infer from this that CA ordered an output from IBM, rather than an outcome. IBM can claim that they have indeed delivered the thing that was ordered, while CA remain disappointed that the effect they had in mind is missing. In Canada's defense though, it's sometimes hard to find someone who will even take on contracts of this magnitude. Getting good terms, even more so.
These large government software projects end up costing way more than they should pretty much every time. The process is just broken. There's way too much design by committee and tying the hands of the people who are doing the actual work, preventing them from implementing the correct solution and instead making them implement the one the disconnected-from-reality specification writers decided on.
Then they have to go back an iterate the correct solution, which involves more committee meetings at huge expense and rewriting documents and disseminating them to everybody...
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#9It's possible to infer from this that CA ordered an output from IBM, rather than an outcome. IBM can claim that they have indeed delivered the thing that was ordered, while CA remain disappointed that the effect they had in mind is missing. In Canada's defense though, it's sometimes hard to find someone who will even take on contracts of this magnitude. Getting good terms, even more so.
Often multiple smaller/medium-sized systems are better for the particular task than one large. Even more so for taxation and payroll systems where taxation/regulation varies greatly.
Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
#10Would you sign to build a project who's MVP is 260,000 salary calculations with rules poorly documented and spread other hundreds of agencies?
Maybe if they started with a subset and slowly built up..