Comment by trout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trout | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing this conversation..

IT Director to Sales Guy: "We just got $20M in grant money for getting broadband across the state. Can you get me some numbers?"

Sales guy to engineering team (partner or internal): "Hey I need lots of boxes. They've got 1300 sites."

Engineering team: "Ok.. what do they need?"

IT Director: "Pretty sure my network guy says everything has to have redundant power supplies and at least 1 ethernet connection. To do a survey for each site would take over a year due to bureaucracy, and I've got 3 months on this grant"

Engineer to Sales guy: "Ok I built out those routers. Do they really need redundant power supplies everywhere? 3900's seem big."

Sales guy: "Ya, that's what they said. Anyways this came out below budget. Thanks!"

IT Director: "Looks to be under budget, meets our needs, thanks!"

.. meanwhile IT management/engineers aren't involved. Somewhere, someone didn't slow this project down to do due diligence. That or somewhere buried in some document is a requirement for redundant power supplies, but that sounds less likely the case.

> Somewhere, someone didn't slow this project down to do due diligence

In it a nutshell.

If anything, there should have been multiple flags raised.

1) A ball park figure should have been estimated on what this should cost, broken down by equipment type.

2) That should have made it clear that switches would be fine for multiple use cases, and the overall estimate should have dropped. *

3) Back and forth with provider as haggling over components proceeds. Massive attention to detail would be shown here.

4) First quote received from Cisco. Due diligence proceeds, issues raised. Customers says NO, just to buy negotiation room. (fine they have a grant, maybe not so aggressive)

5) Updated quote, go back to 4 if issues.

6) Quote acceptance. Now monitoriing of execution.

There should have been many opportunities for flags to have been raised, even before the quote was received. And most definitely after it would have crossed the ball park figure.

* It looks like the clause for redundant power was what tripped it up. Someone said we need X, and then somehow it became the TRUTH for all routers/switches.

So its entirely possible (if not likely) that Cisco said "based on your constraints, these are the only components which match your requirements", and the Government bought it.

Which is face-palm/head-desk territory.

That is also a valid point - if the way your system is set up, it would cost more than the difference to send someone out for the survey to verify a cheaper model is enough, just throw in the higher model. Though in this particular case, it's clearly not what happened.

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