NYC Drops $722M On CityTime Attendance System 306
theodp writes "New York City is reportedly paying 230 consultants an average annual salary of $400K for a computer project that is seven years behind schedule and vastly over budget. The payments continue despite Mayor Bloomberg's admission that the computerized timekeeping and payroll system — dubbed CityTime — is 'a disaster.' Eleven CityTime consultants rake in more than $600K annually, with three of them making as much as $676,000. The 40 highest-paid people on the project bill taxpayers at least $500K a year. Some of the consultants have been working at these rates for as long as a decade."
Hm (Score:1, Interesting)
Is New York City going to follow Washington's lead and tax itself 10% for this custom software? :D
Wait. How would that work?
How hard can it be (Score:4, Interesting)
How hard can it be to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system.
230 highly paid people and it has been underdevelopment for over a decade?
1 person should of been able to get it done in a decade.
Re:Problem = Managers (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, it's government wasting the money. The problem lies within the inability to pull the plug when it's clear it's not coming together. Within that culture, there's an environment that encourages this sort of thinking you ascribe to the businesses. Why should they do any different. They can half-ass their way through things and maybe deliver a lurching horror, maybe deliver nothing- and still keep getting paid for it for the longest time.
In the end, the business won, the government people got to pour a bunch of money down a bottomless pit, and we, the populace and taxpayers, LOST. There's a threshold that should be hit much earlier on, one of "this is not working, perhaps we need to re-think this or stop it," that we're just not seeing with this stuff. That, folks, is what I see needing to change. Once you have that, the rest kind of falls into place- the businesses quit doing this stuff, quit placing the incompetent in important management positions, etc. Because they can't afford to any more.
Inaccurate story (Score:2, Interesting)
The story is inaccurate. The City is not employing these persons and is not paying these persons a salary or any other type of compensation.
The City has hired a company to perform the work and this other company is paying these persons some type of compensation. These persons will never see anything close to the stated "salaries".
The rates being charged are not out of line with rates being charged elsewhere.
Re:Slaves (Score:3, Interesting)
This was at a private for-profit nursing home.
Re:Slaves | it works both ways yah know (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd mod you up but I prefer to chime in. I have a punch clock at $WORK, and since the setup is well done it's surprisingly painless, even agreeable. I'm supposed to work an average of 7h48m per day, sign in in a 90-minute window, sign out in a three-hour window, work at least five and at most ten hours a day, with automatic carries of +- 3 h/week or 4h/4weeks. With regular working hours you only notice when you forget to punch or when you're absent without warning. Then you get an automatic mail.
Now, with those working hours, I most certainly do not earn USD 600K per year, not even 543,698 like the guy on a 30-hour week at CityTime. 600K should be enough for all the software, maybe even including the servers... Feature creep maybe, but near-criminal mismanagement, most certainly.
Re:Problem = Managers (Score:2, Interesting)
The point is, I'd be bloody surprised if I got away with it for more than two weeks.
Unfortunately, that doesn't always seem to be the case. At least where I work, there's a PM who most of the developers and other PMs are aware of his incompetency, but he's still around. What sucks even more about that, is that he tends to get shunted over to low-maintenance projects (or ones no one really cares about) to do less damage, while the others pick up the slack. That doesn't seem to be the situation here, but I've definitely seen incompetency been rewarded.
Re:Slaves (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't fraud on the part of the consultants if the project is poorly managed. They charge what they charge, and if there is nobody saying "This is what the project covers, anything else needs to be a separate project with its own approvals and a separate budget." then it is 100% the fault of the program manager, who works for the government.
It's called scope creep, and it can raise costs astronomically. For example, I know of a project right now that is in the $10 million range that started out as a simple $300,000 parts change. It start as "Such and such needs to be upgraded, so we'll do X and it will be done." Then someone comes along with the bright idea "Well, if you're going to do X, you might as well just do Y instead." Y doubles the cost of the project, but we want it, right? Ok, fine. Then someone comes along and says "Well, if you are going to go ahead and do Y, it only makes sense to do M at the same time." M, of course, doubles the cost of the project. Well, the project is becoming complicated, so we need to hire an engineering firm (which is actually just one guy, but he's really good) to design the system. He charges $150 an hour for his time. He has spent a month designing the system, is essentially finished, when someone in another division gets wind of the project and goes to management with "Well, if they are doing M now, it's a perfect opportunity to do J at the same time and kill two birds with one stone!" This is apparently only a minor cost, but it does mean the engineer has to re-design the system.
We are now into the several million dollar range, and guess what? We just discovered that by starting work on J we have compliance issues, which means we need a team of third-party analysts to come in and determine if the final system will be in compliance with state and local regulations. Now things are getting complicated, you have to bring in a work planner (who charges $50 an hour) on top of everyone else just to keep things running smoothly. And guess what? If that $150 engineer is held up because of someone else's problem he's still charging his time.
Before long you've spent $10 million on a $300,000 project and have absolutely nothing to show for it. Oh yeah and that engineer has made over $300,000 in the year this project has gone on (remember he originally finished it in a month, but it changed).
I guarantee this is almost the exact same scenario for this time system debacle. Don't blame the consultants, it's rarely truly their fault beyond the final delivery of a shoddy product. They'll only be doing exactly what you tell them to. If what you tell them changes from week to week, expect the project to never end and expect a huge bill. They were just smart enough to charge a high enough rate that they could ride the chaos generated by poor project management and pad their bank accounts with other people's incompetence.
They aren't necessarily doing anything wrong, or even unethical. The whole thing is almost certainly not entirely their fault, if at all.
Remember this with regards to project management: Quality assurance is the responsibility of the vendor (the consultants), quality control is the responsibility of the customer (NYC). If the consultants really were scamming the government, the PM should have been refusing payment years ago. More likely, the PM is incompetent and kept changing the scope or allowing others to change the scope, preventing the consultants from actually finishing the job. It's much more common than it should be, and no matter the situation the buck stops with the project manager, not the consultant.
What's truly amazing is that the upper management kept approving the massive budget for this obviously failing project.