Based on more than a quarter of a century IT experience:
- It will be late.
- It will be over budget. Somewhere between double and 10 times the original quote.
- No penalties will be paid for being late.
- Hull City Council will probably keep paying for BOTH systems to work until both the current and new system will be replaced.
- It won't do what is promised.
- It won't do what is necessary.
- It won't roll up those hundreds of departmental Excel and perhaps Access files into a supported whole.
- It will BREAK those hundreds of Excel files.
- No, no one knows how those Excel files work - they just do.
- In the end, the scope of the project will bear NO resemblance to the original project.
- No one in the Council will have an idea of EXACTLY what the software should do.
- Any IT that could have interpreted what the users want and what the software could/should do, were let go three years ago.
- No one in the Council will have time to test.
- What initial testing does get done will fail, meaning that the whole thing will start to smell like month old kippers kept on a radiator in a student's apartment, over summer with the windows shut.
- The perfect will indeed be the enemy of the good.
- No stakeholder will be satisfied except the sales people and executives of the winning contractors.
Daggy, F. esq.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
