IBM settles £36m Direct Line insurance platform project lawsuit, after claiming Teradata tried to usurp its spot

British insurer Direct Line has settled with IBM over a High Court case it brought against the firm for £36m in which it had alleged that Big Blue fatally bungled a far-reaching Agile methodology-based insurance platform IT project. Direct Line’s 2014 Best for Customer (B4C) project (originally Project Emerald) was supposed to …

[oiseau]

Translation

... an IBM spokeswoman would only say: "The proceedings between DLIS and IBM have been settled on confidential terms".

Translation:

Once again, we screwed up big time but could not blame the contractor or the customer so we decided to fold before things got worse and even more shit reached the fan.

O.

[ecofeco]

Re: Translation

Your corporate translation kung fu skills are superior.

[Pascal Monett]

IBM "had no one suitably qualified available."

Obviously.

IBM has spent a decade getting rid of them.

[ecofeco]

Re: IBM "had no one suitably qualified available."

Longer than that, but, yeah.

[David 132]

Re: IBM "had no one suitably qualified available."

And apparently the employees they now have were not able to do the needful.

[Doctor Syntax]

"ostensibly fully designed"

But the first paragraph says it was Agile so what's this strange word "designed"?

[AMBxx]

Always seems to be a case of cart before horse. The project methodology shouldn't be the lead item in the project.

[MrReynolds2U]

Hopefully the end of an era

I think they've finally put the "nobody ever got fired for using IBM" phrase to bed.

Now it's more like "nobody with any skill is left at IBM, because they all got made redundant".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hopefully the end of an era

It's not about the skills as much as the "everybody who signed an IBM contract recieves a reassuringly long, drawn out expensive failure"

While that maybe related to the skills gap, even if you luck out and get a skilled team chances are IBM will still find a way to screw you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it's more like "nobody with any skill is left at IBM, because they all got made redundant".

Not so much that - there are still good technical people working at IBM, and as is always the case with big projects, IBM will fill technical roles with contractors (because there's aren't enough good technical people left at IBM these days to be able to staff more than 1 or 2 big projects at the same time).

The real problem with these big failed projects is always that the Sales and Solutioning team are NOT technical, and have no idea how to actually deliver on the promises they make to the client. Yes, they're all clued up on the industry buzzwords and terminology, but they don't have the first clue about how to actually deliver it, how complex it is, what skills they would need and how scarce they are, or how long it would take. They invariably under-cost the project to win the deal and don't understand that some of the stuff they promised the customer as part of the solution involves a huge piece of work that they haven't factored-in the time, skills or costs for, and it might not even be technically possible.

I worked on a project once where the Sales and Solution team had promised the customer we'd implement a certain capability using a particular software product, but that software product physically could not do what they'd told the customer it could. Every time I said "But it can't do that", the customer was very quick to chirp up "but you [the royal You] told us it would", and the IBM Sales team kept trying to tell me to find some way of making it work because they already told the customer it would! The laws of physics finally won out over the fairytales and the customer accepted that the s/w concerned couldn't do what they'd been promised. It wasn't pretty, but thankfully the customer accepted that maybe the Sales team didn't know what they were talking about and it was a relatively small 'stepping-stone' part of the overall project anyway which would be superseded by a better capability (that DID work!) the time we got to the end.

[James Anderson]

Timeous ?

Out of the box vocabulary for dynamic forward thinking brainless powerpointies.

[Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse]

I love a bit of Teradata...

That song they made about Tequila was a particularly jolly one.

[David 132]

Re: I love a bit of Teradata...

Yes, that's what Some People Say.

[MrBanana]

Top news?

Is there any point posting yet another failed IBM project implementation in the top banner any more? A much, much bigger news story would be a successful IBM project - but I'm not holding my breath.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Top news?

But everyone enjoys the heartwarming story of the former champ, slowing to a stop in old age, punch drunk from too many fights it didn't win losing another round.

Anyone who has had the pleasure of IBM's legal might explaining why your company has just wasted an awful lot of money on something that you definitely won't be getting will enjoy the underdogs victory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who has had the pleasure ... will enjoy the underdogs victory.

Believe it or not, even the staffers like to see it. We're fed up to the back teeth with sales clowns selling a fairy story which the technical teams then struggle to deliver because they're crippled by unachievable timelines, lack of appropriate skills, often trying to do things that aren't (or shouldn't be!) possible, and with no availability of people to do the work. You end up spending more time in awkward and uncomfortable meetings with the customer trying to explain why its not all roses and chocolates than you do trying to get anything done.

Each time one of these law suits goes against IBM we all secretly hope that a lesson will be learned and we won't end up in the same situation again next time.

Hah! More fool us, eh?