[Small-L]

"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,"

From personal experience, that's the SAIC management philosophy--Get a Time and Materials contract, burn through the money as fast as possible, book the profits as early as possible, and worry about delivering a product later--usually with dozens of Engineering Changes to pad to total cost and profit.

[MNJohnnie]

Welcome to the wonderful world of IT. Situation completely normal for companies that rely on outside "Consultants" to do their IT work. This crap happens in the real world all the time too. This is the fruit of the "Can't we all just get along" mindset and out of control Lawyers looking for the next excuse to file a lawsuit. Everyone is so busy playing CYA they forget to DO THEIR JOB.

[Seruzawa]

Corruption in govt contracting? Whodathunk? (sarc off)

Look on the bright side. Some FBI middlemanager is going to get a nice retirement job.

And people thought that contract corruption is limited to the DOD.

[Condor51]

...the SAIC software was incomplete, inadequate and so poorly designed that it would be essentially unusable under real-world conditions.

What the heck are they talking about? It works just fine.

(sheesh, what did they expect for $170 million, Ms. Pac-Man?)

[3AngelaD]

This story took up an entire page and was so disorganized I had to read it twice. Too bad they didn't bother to edit it. Same thing happened to the Border Patrol a decade ago. Why can Visa, Mastercard, ect manage to obtain effective programs for dealing with huge masses of info, but the government can't? Ditto communicating airline passanger lists from abroad before planes take off.

[art_rocks]

So will SAIC be prohibited from competing for other government contracts.

[art_rocks]

Sadly, some college students could set up the system using available software. Too many government agencies assume they need new software but don't look at using what is commercially availbe and paying someone to set it up. I bet Oracle or Microsoft could have done the project using an existing product.

[GalaxieFiveHundred]

Technicians complete final tests on FBI's new system...

[FReepaholic]

...From personal experience, that's the SAIC management philosophy--Get a Time and Materials contract, burn through the money as fast as possible, book the profits as early as possible, and worry about delivering a product later--usually with dozens of Engineering Changes to pad to total cost and profit. ...

From my own experience, it's not just SAIC. This philosophy is rampant in all areas of government contracting.

[mbynack]

I appears that the FBI managers can take a lot of the blame on this. There's plenty to go around. I've done some software development for the government and there approach can be pretty screwy. They fund the project without clear objectives. They change specifications during the project that require major rework or aren't compatible with previous specifications. At several points during the project the government changes the person responsible for evaluating and accepting the project. They get promoted, retire, or are moved to other projects. The new guy has a completely different vision.

I did a project for the Navy where the project was managed by a committee that met once a month. None of the people on the committee had any software experience and every time they met they changed the specifications for the project. Every change they made required months of rework and introduced new problems to the software. For example, they asked for a database that would run on Windows 98. We were in the final testing phases when they decided it needed to be compatible with DOS. It started as an MS Access program and they decided it needed to run over the internet.

The initial concept was straight forward and could have been done for a couple of hundred thousand. In the end the project ran over 5 million and was scrapped before it was ever operational.

[PsyOp]

I'm sure the who thing could have been done with off the shelf software using any number of available data-base programs. The bigger the budget the bigger the boondoggel.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

This is what happens when

1) non-tech administrators have to make decisions about tech.

2) mid-level knowledge people have been thinned out in budget reductions or outsourced.

3. See number 1.

[OldCorps]

Lol, used to work for SAIC myself. It was all about billing.

[DustyMoment]

But, the GOOD news is that SAIC got $170 million!!

Moral of the story: DON'T buy a cow until you've tested the milk FIRST!!!

[wideminded]

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.

[KC_Conspirator]

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.

[KC_Conspirator]

"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.

[TChris]

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.