The FBI's Upgrade That Wasn't (Gov't Mismanagement Alert)

Matthew Patton, a programmer who worked on the contract for SAIC, said the company seemed to make no attempts to control costs. It kept 200 programmers on staff doing "make work," he said, when a couple of dozen would have been enough. The company's attitude was that "it's other people's money, so they'll burn it every which way they want to," he said.

Looks like SAIC was getting paid in proportion to the number of staff who were "working", with no relation to the amount of work that was getting done. I've seen this happen with military contracting.

If the programmers were put into direct communication with the actual users of the product, there would be a joint effort to develop something useful. But there are always layers of stupid useless bureaucracy on both sides.

The end result is that the proper goal of doing something good for the country while making an honest buck becomes merely a game to keep the billable hours flowing.

Actually, a lot of software developed for the U.S. government appears to be "single use" and is often locked down pretty tight in terms of where and how it is going to be used.

What the U.S. government needs to do is develop a high level, object oriented API toolbox for developing a secure, modular systems for storing and recalling content in government databases. The front end application would merely be an interpreter for the high level code, much like a web browser... In fact, it could be a web browser designed and compiled to work with enhanced security protocols for the new toolbox.

That would be an interesting aspect of a special, secure browser for accessing secure government database applications. By default, if a browser can't convince the database application that it is a secure browser, its access to the database would be limited automatically, regardless of what access level the user may have usually.

The company continued to meet the bureau's requests, accepting payments despite clear signs that the FBI's approach to the project was badly flawed, according to people who were involved in the project or later reviewed it for the government.

Being here in the market area, almost anybody in this field knows something about this failed project. I heard it was about 60% SAIC and about 40% FBI's fault. Sometimes these government clients can be difficult, speaking through experience.. I heard that new and revised requirments for the project were like 10+ a day. Thats lack of focus on the FBI part and lack of skills on SAIC's part to set them straight. Lack of professionalism on both parts. This does not excuse SAIC, because they have to be held accountable for garbage they produced, and from my experience, I have not been all that impressed by SAIC.

"SAIC was at fault because of the usual contractor reluctance to tell the customer, 'You're screwed up. You don't know what you're doing. This project is going to fail because you're not managing your side of the equation,' " said Kay, who later became the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq.

Here is how the game is played in DC though, if SAIC tells the FBI "You are screwed up", the FBI then says "You're fired" and then offer the contract to a competitor.

The moral of the story: (And the moral of many stories like it.)

You get what you pay for!

If the contract is set up so the company is paid for a worthless product, or worse yet, paid before even delivering a product, then that's what you'll get: crap.

OTOH, if you set up a contract to pay only after you receive a functioning, quality piece of work that meets all requirements, then you'll get that, and more quickly too.

Don't pay a dime until you have what you ordered. It solves many problems all at once.

I spent five years working with SAIC...and there were rare occassions that I could see terrific work being done and no fingerprints left by management. But note...I said rare occassions.

The company has an interesting approach....they have tons of people on the payroll throughout the organization who simply sit and wait. When a juicy contract comes up...they look for a connection to the top customer...and they find some guy who worked with him years ago. They bring in their budget analysts who figure how to get the most cash out of the customer. They size up their competition and often get the smaller and less costy guys out of the way by sub-contracting part of the deal down to them if they just withdraw. Finally, upon winning, they find division chief who rarely knows anything about project but is a favorite or darling amonsgt the SAIC management. Other favorite managers and team leaders are brought in...and they forge ahead. The real players...the planners, the programmers, the analysts....are usually kept in check by SAIC's no-risk concept...preached over and over. Don't do anything that might upset the customer....invoke as little time with the customer as possible, and simply look busy (you must turn in monthly activity reports, which are edited by your team chief, then re-edited by assistant division chief, then re-re-edited by the organizational grammer queen and the division chief himself...which is all billed to the customer in man-hours).

I personally watched SAIC bury itself into the ground with a customer and then over five years....the whole core of support with the customer just rotted away. The monthly accomplishment report....which consumed well over $12k monthly to produce for sixty personnel...was never read by the customer. The customer eventually lost respect for SAIC and their management concepts.

I won't miss dumping on the FBI in this case...because they should have had montly reviews and knew that things weren't working right. Probably none of the FBI management people involved in this episode will be demoted or disciplined...even though they share alot of the pain in this episode.

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