La ditta coinvolta nel Consiglio Arts Law ha vinto un premio “partner del governo dell’anno”

I’ve worked for one of these consultancies, they are pretty transparent in what they charge, what the project plan is and who in terms of resource type will work on a project, there are no surprises for the client. 

When I see one of these stories I immediately think that the client is at fault, generally not enough experience to write a specification, lots of change requests, not enough user acceptance testing and no understanding that some of their “must have” features involve a shit load of custom development and will likely be used rarely, I bet there is an off the shelf solution out there that would have 90%+ of the features they think they need. Most importantly they don’t write the cheques. Can you really blame a business for saying yes when asked to do something? 

As for being partner of the year, that’s because they send a lot of business in Microsoft’s direction, that award will bounce between the big 3-5 Microsoft partners every year, it’s a marketing tool that comes with a nice awards dinner, nothing more. 

Seems to be a major problem to delivery if IT projects across different government departments and public sector in this county going back as far as the Gardaí that time years ago.

No shortage of expertise and companies who could deliver them. In this case there seems to have been a bit of a revolving door of management on this project at the department with nobody know what the hell was going on.

I mentioned recently someone from industry being questioned by a committee for Broadband I think it was about 10 years ago on the oireachtas tv channel and the person answering practically banging their head off the table in frustration as the answers where not being understood no matter how simply put and the committee members/TDs not being even remotely qualified to be asking them.

IT projects are complex.

Large IT projects are very complex and have a high failure rate.

But of course this has been reduced to ‘consultancy company rips off taxpayer’ because that’s simpler than explaining to people that it’s extremely hard to estimate the cost of a large IT project, especially one designed to replace an old system which is probably not well documented or understood and one that is run by people who don’t frequently run large IT projects (the client, not the IT companies).

The AC aren’t the first organisation to fall into that pit and they share the pit with both government and private organisations.

Click bait headline as per the article the award was given by Microsoft and not anyone in the government