Rhode Island sues HPE for making its DMV even more miserable The US state of Rhode Island is suing Hewlett Packard Enterprise over a car-crash IT project to overhaul its vehicle licensing system. In a lawsuit [PDF] filed to the State Superior Court on Tuesday, the Rhode Island Department of Revenue and Department of Administration accused the enterprise giant of breaching contract on an …
Having lived in New England USA, I can tell you that except for Connecticut, government systems there are antiquated and buggy. Also, Rhode Island and Massachusetts are notorious for cronyism and politicians that expect regular [cough cough] "consulting fees".
So, pick one - RI's DMV was even worse off than HP contracted for, or some RI officials have not received their envelopes in a long time.
I got a dollar that says being open sourced wouldn't have changed a thing. I'm betting that the original contract and specifications will tell the tale along with a paper trail of emails requesting things that were not in the specs or contract.
This is way too common in the IT world. Those writing the specs usually haven't a clue what all needs to be spec'd out which is "everything". For some reason, they write the specs for X and Y, but they think the contractor will know that Z needs to be included.
Yep. Not an IT project, but back in the 80's the Navy bought some of our walk-in freezers for their base in Reyjavik.
After installation, we had to fly an engineer out to install magnetic door gaskets. On our aluminum walled freezers. Cuz that was spec. I would have gone myself, but - it was Reyjavik. I'm more of a Caribbean kind of guy.
I've seen it go both ways (sometimes in the same project): The client constantly shifts goal posts, and the contractors making up their own. It takes a lot of proactive communication and a desire (on both sides) for a successful completion for a project to not suck.
Based on the soundbites in the Article, I'm guessing RI changed some specs (or requested nice-to-haves/stretch goals) mid-work, and HPE said "Sure!"; then HPE "re-allocated resources" to cover the new work, and used that re-allocation as an excuse to skip work they didn't want to do - without telling RI that their requirements were getting run-over by the new nice-to-haves.
Plenty of Fail to go around.
Most of the time I've seen IT projects go spectacularly wrong (and I've seen a few in my time as a Big 4 consultant), they were big ones. I am no project manager but it appears to me that project difficulty grows exponentially with project size.
Government projects are usually big and have the additional drawback of being overseen by the Government.
@lotus49 - Large projects are more difficult than smaller ones but the one key to any large project is proper planning. I have around some very large non-IT government projects that came in on time and on budget. To do this require a lot of careful planning and costing and discussions with potential vendors about what is suitable (usually fairly standard equipment). And there was field testing done with pilot scale equipment. It appears that large, government IT projects do nothing like any of these things but go off with big bang and thus fly on a wing and a prayer. Migrating data from one database to another, did any even try a pilot project to see how difficult it might be. It will get all the answers but it will force people to actually address the nuts and bolts of doing..
I work for a court in California. Years ago, we were supposed to get a shiny, new statewide IT system for all courts, CCMS. The criminals consultants were Deloitte Consulting. (Obligatory Dilbert).
The system never happened. After the central state courts overseeing office poured about $300 million down the rathole to Deloitte, the state legislature ordered them to stop and then slashed all court funding (since the central high-ups screwed up, it's only right to punish everyone who works for the courts).
One thing the court high-ups did was to actually sign a contract that specified that the system was working, and they did that before it was delivered. When the delivered "system" turned out to be a giant grogan, and Deloitte were asked to fix it, their response was something on the lines of "Oh, you have a problem? Well, sure, for another $100 million or so, we could take a look at it for you!"
Typical government IT project: Incompetent managers and crooked CON-sultants, working together for a better tomorrow.
AC for obvious reasons.
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