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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (13381)	5/24/2002 7:14:51 PM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

The good old days of "get the contract at any price and we'll either get well on overruns or follow-ons" are largely gone. Ah, the good old days of private sector corruption and low-ball bids. The 'conservative' way of business. Then blame the government, of course. You think they're gone?...Ballistic Missile Defense...the Defender Artillery System....the three tactical fighters that are in the new budget. jttmab

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (13381)	5/24/2002 9:01:15 PM
From: Tom C	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

A number of years ago I worked on a firm fixed price contract to develop a wholesale supply system (logistics) for a government agency for 400,000 dollars that had an overrun of 600,000 dollars (cost = 1 MM). The worst part of the deal was that the contract amount (400,000) was a lump sum to be paid after System Acceptance Testing. This eight-month project ended up taking two years. I later learned that the government’s own estimates for the project was around 2 MM. At the beginning of the project, day one, I knew it was a loser, but I did my part, the DB design and conversion routines on time. As coding of the user interface part of the system floundered I notice that smart people were leaving the company or moved to other projects. That’s pretty much how I came to be the Project Manager. It was what I consider a classic failed project, a complete rewrite for a new platform (conversion) with significant and moving target new requirements. The software is required to do everything it did before but all the business owners want to talk about is the new features. There was enormous pressures running this project but things finally came to a head in a meeting at the Pentagon. Someone on the government side said the system would not even pass the Test Plan we provided as one of the deliverables. That’s when I made the 400,000 dollar dare, the gist of the dare was that if it passes the Test Plan (we wrote) they pay us the 400,000 dollars for the system. The date was set one month out. One other developer and I worked day and night to make sure the system would pass this clumsy poorly written test plan. Even if the test plan expected results were wrong, we changed the system to produce the plan results. On the day(s) of reckoning, we passed the test and I was hero. We even got a follow on “cost plus” contract to add in additional requirements (i.e. actually make it work). What kind of reward did I see from this? I took over a project that was in just as bad shape. A cost plus project where I had to let half of the staff go. For some reason all the worst employees in the division were assigned to this project. If someone was not working out on another project they were transferred to the one I was taking over. It hadn’t had a project manager for three months. Letting people go sucked! I also got a $100 Presidents Award. A month after taking over my new (reward) project I was out of there… Tom ps: I’m glad I don’t have to do the government contracting thing any more. Viva, the private sector dealing with other private sector firms.