Anatomy of a Runaway Project 326
JCWDenton recommends a piece by Bruce Webster revealing some insights into a failed multi-million-dollar IT project. "The following document is the actual text — carefully redacted — of a memo I wrote some time back after performing an IT project review; names and identifying concepts have been changed to preserve confidentiality (and protect the guilty). The project in question was a major IT re-engineering effort for a mission-critical system; at the time I did this review, the project had been going on for several years and had cost millions of dollars; it would eventually be canceled and the work products abandoned. The memo itself provides an interesting glimpse into just how a major IT project can go so far off the tracks that nothing useful is ever delivered."
Text of Article (Score:4, Informative)
Anatomy of a runaway IT project
By bfwebster on Jun 16, 2008 in Main, Management, Project Failure
[Welcome to reddit and FARK visitors!]
The following document is the actual text -- carefully redacted -- of a memo I wrote some time back [i.e., several years ago] after performing an IT project review; names and identifying concepts have been changed to preserve confidentiality (and protect the guilty). The project in question was a major IT re-engineering effort for a mission-critical system; at the time I did this review, the project had been going on for several years and had cost millions of dollars; it would eventually be canceled and the work products abandoned. The memo itself provides an interesting glimpse into just how a major IT project can go so far off the tracks that nothing useful is ever delivered.
Note that the "ABC" consultants were a small part of the overall project team and had been brought in relatively late by "BigFirm" in an attempt to get the "FUBAR" project into production; they neither initiated nor managed the project. [NOTE for those of you who have written or done Google searches: "Bob Winsom", like all the other names in the memo as transcribed below, is a pseudonym.]
CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM -- EYES ONLY
Over the past two weeks, I've conducted confidential off-site group interviews with all of the ABC consultants working on the FUBAR project. I did this at [ABC manager's] request, after a few of these consultants spoke privately about FUBAR with him. The feedback was consistent and raises serious doubts about whether the FUBAR project, as currently pursued, can ever yield a successful production deployment.
This report groups those comments into several broad areas. It is relatively unfiltered and extremely direct (no withholding). It represents the private comments of ABC consultants who have little to gain and possibly much to lose by being so blunt. These are not the whinings of purists picking nits. These are the grounded assessments of top-notch IT professionals who have among them a century or two of experience bringing projects to completion -- particularly those involving [specific IT] technology -- and who are down in the FUBAR trenches every day. QUALITY OF WORK AND EFFORT
ISSUE: Several consultants said -- and the rest pretty much agreed -- that far too many of the deliverables, artifacts, and activities (e.g., algorithms, source code, system configuration, design/architecture documents, testing, defect tracking, scheduling etc.) are substantially below any acceptable professional standards and represent a profound threat to FUBAR ever going into production.
EXAMPLES: The code base is very fragile. A lot of it is bad old code that BigFirm didn't have time to rewrite two years ago, but now is five times its original size and even worse. One consultant said he took a code listing, picked pages at random, and found problems on every page he selected. There is pervasive hard coding of what should be adjustable parameters or at least meaningfully named constants (e.g., # of [key items] hard-coded throughout with the literal value '3, a constant named 'ninety_eight'). Builds take all night. App releases don't run acceptably, if at all, in a production environment. Developers check in files that won't even compile.
RISKS: The FUBAR project keeps being touted as a world-class development team, but it is not producing world-class, or even minimally-professional, results. This already shows up in the project delays and quality issues of the releases to date. What the team is producing will not only be very difficult to support and modify, it will in all likelihood be unusable, resulting in a complete failure of the FUBAR project. PROJECT PLANNING AND EXECUTION
ISSUE: Project planning and execution is all to often poor or missing completely. Milestone dates, usually unrealistic if not impossible, are based on p
link (Score:2, Informative)
except for the part about (Score:4, Informative)
Ouch -- server problems (Score:3, Informative)
Seen it before (Score:3, Informative)
I've seen this so many times with the big consulting firms. They low ball the bids. Then they send in kids who were just handed their degrees and a manual about some technology and told to implement the technology at a client's site (basically it's the only people they can afford with the bid). It goes downhill because their lack of experience and lack of project management. Later the big consulting firm brings in a subcontractor to fix the issues (mainly because the client refuses to pay anymore and may have milestones/clauses that allow them not to pay). The subcontractor usually is smaller, has more expertise, but costs much more. But they are given a huge and seemingly impossible task. Sometimes they can rescue the project. Sometimes they can't.
Java can be performant server side (Score:5, Informative)
That old myth? That hasn't been true for many years now, for server side code anyway (which this was describing). Modern JIT compilers make java as fast, and sometimes faster (since you are optimizing code as it runs and not statically beforehand).
But no language will help you if you lack discipline or the ability to code (both of which seemed lacking in this case).
Every company on earth uses "deliverables" (Score:4, Informative)
All of them. Phrases like that are highly viral and travel through the world management population in under a month.
The article was so generic, it could have described projects I've seen from companies with under a hundred people to a cast of thousands.
Re:\.ed already ? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Interesting line (Score:4, Informative)
Come on now, COBOL isn't that bad. :P. But seriously Java isn't the language you would use for high performance but rather high portability. That says a lot about how bad the original code was.
Sounds suspiciously like Wawanesa Insurance... (Score:3, Informative)
A nice little 3.5 year IT boondoggle that cost a cool $70 million and cost one board member of 19 years his job. It all just came to light last month. It made some pretty big headlines around these parts as well.
Re:Merit? (Score:5, Informative)
I was brought in from the outside specifically to conduct a review and summarize my findings in a memo for one specific person in upper management at BigFirm who was above the FUBAR project and who had grave concerns about it, given that at that point the project was years late and millions over budget, and which showed few signs of making it into production anytime soon.
I was not one of the "coders" -- I was not even a project member -- and I certainly wasn't a "new kid out of college"; I graduated with BSCS in 1978; my first programming languages were 360 assembly, PL/1 and FORTRAN, and by the time I conducted this review, I had personally done professional software engineering (including project management, architecture, and consulting) in a wide range of operating systems and programming languages over quite a few fifferent industries.
The ABC consultants, to a person, were likewise very senior software engineers with many years of hands-on coding experience and well-established track records of successful project delivery.
I'm surprised that an IT manager doesn't know what "very fragile code" means. "Fragile code" means that efforts to modify one section of code -- to fix a bug, add functionality, or improve performance -- frequently results in the code "breaking" elsewhere, usually in multiple places. The opposite of "fragile code" is "robust code".
The memo states clearly that previous architects had left (not "project managers"); the problem was that the FUBAR project manager (with no technical background) kept driving them off and, as the memo notes, fancied himself a software architect.
The syndrome of "kingdom building" through increased head-count has long been a major cause of IT project failure; in this case, there were far too many programmers than the problem actually required.
As for my "amateur" status, I'll simply point here [brucefwebster.com]; is the manager willing to do the same? (Sorry about the server problems; I'm raising hell with my hosting service, given what I pay each month for a dedicated server.)
Re:Text of Article (Score:4, Informative)
Also, remember that this was a professional memo written to a high-level manager at BigFirm. It wasn't written to be amusing.
Themocline of Truth (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mythical Man Month. (Score:3, Informative)
Its Obvious (Score:3, Informative)
You can have a kick azz senior team and still fail.
Re:TFA is a worthless assessment with no measures (Score:3, Informative)
The memo was never indented to be a close-detail, point-by-point listing of existing flaws in the project; for starters, that probably would have filled a few binders at least. A request for such a review would be the natural follow-up by the senior executive; it would likely take at least a few months. (I have done that kind of review, though not for this project.)
Re:Management (Score:3, Informative)
Yep. What you said.
Re:Irony (Score:3, Informative)
With XP sticking around for years, Windows has become less of a moving target as well.