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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

I would guess the project was (is?) running pretty much just as the people in charge wanted it to run.

10 years in and they were still billing -- more than ever -- for a project that would have completed 7-8 years previously if things had been done according to plan.

All the seemingly massively stupid and counter productive decisions made make sense if the goal is to confuse matters to make it seem like progress has been made or reforms instituted or bold corrective actions taken while actually keeping the project hopelessly mired.

It's like the Producers. (Though without the ironic twist... in reality it surely must be impossible to accidentally complete a software project successfully. No doubt, without the laughs either.)

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But they are being fined at E1000's a day. In the UK we now have projects forced to go through regular if not frequent traffic light reviews - a panel of actual experts reviews the project - i think it was one such thing that killed the NHS network project (12 billion over spend). one panel, one review. saved money.

i suspect the french gov will have put something similar in place, but i do agree with the final paragraph of the piece - it's probably a corrupt practise not top management stupidity.

> The company recovers daily penalties by billing ever-increasing change requests to the government. The year is 2008.

I hope you didn't miss that sentence. It's the irony that probably lives in every government project.

> a panel of actual experts reviews the project

Except, as these things go, what is being reviewed is whether the projects meets its arbitrarily nonsensical, self contradictory requirements and whether all 1528 required process artifacts have been properly archived in manila folders, not whether the project makes sense or follows basic economic principles.

killed AFTER 12 billion over spend, not very effective

Better than having it blunder on for another 5 years and 10 billion without achiving anything.

While its effectiveness is questionable, not killing it would be an ever bigger failure.

that killed the NHS network project (12 billion over spend)

No money to give nurses a pay rise but IT consultants laughing all the way to the bank. And the same consulting companies still have their noses in the trough.

Same story at the MoD.

What did the demotivational poster say? Consultants don’t make money with solutions, they make money by prolonging the problem.

That's the fallacy with hourly billing. The alternative model is value-based pricing, where you price the solution/intervention upfront.

Of course, this becomes more expensive upfront as well, because the consultant takes on the risk. Hourly billing seems cheaper to the client, since they have to take on the risk instead.

Public contracts (like the one mentioned in the blog post) are "valued-based" ("contrat au forfait" in french).

But you can circumvent these by over-billing contract additions/change in requirements ("avenants" in french). In theory those are limited to 20% of the original amount, but with contract renewals and if the government agency already sunk large sum of money into the project it's possible to bypass this limit.

Which leads to situations like this:

http://www.quartetservice.com/wp-content/gallery/boat/cs-pic...

hah! I saw the original boat in person and laughed at the time, but didn't see the name on the dingy. Awesome :)

Very few large projects like this are based on hourly billing / time and materials. Proper procurement would do fixed price contracts (outcomes based) with a set number of contract variations in place. Where large consulting companies / system integrators secure their margins (and tangentially try and screw over their customer) is by making the fixed price offer really attractive and then to hard on scope as requirements change to pump through as many contract variations as possible at a premium price.

"If you're not part of the solution, there is good money to be made in prolonging the problem"

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