
Cor! What a waste
Encore!
A sweeping US government IT program has paid millions of dollars to contractors who may not even have performed the work, says the DoD's Inspector General's Office, and it's placing the blame mostly on unqualified overseers. The OIG released a report this week on the $17.5 billion ENCORE III [PDF] program that found a number …
Probably the most profitable niche is doing work for a government on a subject they have no clue about but need because "everybody is telling you" it needs to be done. Nobody knows what needs to be done and there is a huge pile of money available.
When you have the talk-to-the-right-persons skill and posses the how-to-fill-out-government-forms skill, then you are set for life with rather little effort. Its just a game.
With 5 of 48 orders analyzed. So it's probably more like $250M wasted,or 1/7. That sounds pretty unreasonable.
And that's just wasted in this fashion. How much waste for overpriced products? How much for systems that are not fit for purpose, or are significantly less productive than they should be?
For very big projects, spending money on the front end to adequately define the scope and also the performance expectations is important. It also has to be documented in plain language that should also be reviewed by another separate group to see if it makes sense. I'm going through that now with a very small project where I'm working with somebody on the other side of the planet who was born and raised using another language. I'm spending plenty of time documenting so I'm not wasting their time having to redo code due to poor descriptions on my part.
Not only does the start up have to be done right, it should also include milestones that can be checked as the project progresses so errors are caught early. I'm not a fan of huge monolithic "one code base to rule them all" programs. Scope bloat often makes for unsupportable projects.