Wednesday, November 28, 2012

A Billion Here A Billion There...



Air Force scraps massive ERP project after racking up $1 billion in costs

IDG News Service (Boston Bureau) — The U.S. Air Force has decided to scrap a major ERP (enterprise resource planning) software project after spending US$1 billion, concluding that finishing it would cost far too much more money for too little gain.
Dubbed the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS), the project has racked up $1.03 billion in costs since 2005, "and has not yielded any significant military capability," an Air Force spokesman said in an emailed statement Wednesday. "We estimate it would require an additional $1.1B for about a quarter of the original scope to continue and fielding would not be until 2020. The Air Force has concluded the ECSS program is no longer a viable option for meeting the FY17 Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) statutory requirement. Therefore, we are cancelling the program and moving forward with other options in order to meet both requirements."
Read more at the link above.  Who ever thought after it went past the $100m level that we should keep trying until we wasted a billion?  

9 comments:

Cinco-X said...

We're had a comparable experience with SAP...though we purchased a package solution in lieu of developing our own. I'm beginning to think that the problem of creating an enterprise wide solution that makes everyone happy is intractable, and that with even the best overall solutions, very few of the vested parties end up happy. In the worse (worser, worst) solutions, one or two groups are very happy and the rest of the organization finds to tool to be bordering on useless, or even a hindrance....

sm_landlord said...


I used to work at a company that had a similar experience. After dumping $2 million into an Oracle consultantware system, most people refused to transition to the new system, and the CEO had to threaten to fire people if they did not switch over.

Government operations seem to make the same mistakes, just on a much larger scale. At least the USAF collected the common sense to eventually kill this particular turkey.

Cinco-X said...

sm_landlord said... Government operations seem to make the same mistakes, just on a much larger scale. At least the USAF collected the common sense to eventually kill this particular turkey.

I seem to recall once seeing a statistic where >90% of government sponsored SW projects never worked/were finished/etc. Poor specifications is one problem. Circumstances changing before the end of the project is another. In all honesty, I wouldn't be surprised if civilian SW projects didn't have a similar magnitude of failure rate; it's just sometimes easier to "spin it" or hide it in a larger corporation...

Cobradriver said...

We have a maintenance program done in house.

Upside? It does a whole lot of really neat and useful stuff and it gets better every year.

Downside? We have one dedicated programmer with a limited budget so it takes forever to get anything changed/added...

Chris

Cinco-X said...

"Cobradriver said... We have a maintenance program done in house... Downside? We have one dedicated programmer with a limited budget so it takes forever to get anything changed/added..."

In a sense, that downside really isn't a downside...that programmer doesn't need a manager to coordinate what s/he's doing with the work of others...s/he doesn't have to worry so much about breaking someone else's work with a SW revision/patch. IOW, being such a small project greatly simplifies the problem.
Compare that to making an "Enterprise Solution" for a MNC with >100,00 employees in >15 countries that handles payroll and taxes in all of those regions, procurement, shipping, billing and receiving, etc., and that has to be useable by all employees 24 hours a day and CANNOT go down for maintenance, and where the cost of a crash is measured in millions of dollars per hour...

FD: The place I work is smaller than that, but never-the-less has all of those problems but on a smaller scale...Heck, the place I used to work had those problems with under 10 million in sales...

Rob Dawg said...

Nothing wrong with a dedicated programmer that extensive documentation won't cover.

Property Flopper said...

Life becomes "fun" when that one programmer leaves. The only source of "why does this do that" is gone.

I've had to pick up several projects that were left that way. It's always entertaining to have to do forensic coding.

Rob Dawg said...

PF,
It pays the kids' tuition. ;-)

One service I offer I list explicitly as "corporate memory." Employees come and go but the "outside guy" remembers stuff.

TJandTheBear said...

Hell, 90% of my contracts involved "rescuing" projects on the verge of failure. Fun stuff.