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Pitfalls

UK Universal Credit project — complete write-off of code?

November 5, 2013 0 Comments
UK Universal Credit project — complete write-off of code?

I’ve written twice before (here and here) about the severe problems with the British government’s Universal Credit project. From my first post: The British government has spent roughly half a billion pounds ($750M) developing a new IT system for its welfare services, with the goal of cutting down on fraud and loss. The project, by all accounts, has […]

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Why government IT projects are so prone to failure or overruns

September 30, 2013 2 Comments
Why government IT projects are so prone to failure or overruns

Joseph Marks over at Government Executive Magazine has an excellent article on the propensity of government IT projects to having significant cost/schedule overruns or to fail altogether. One of the key issues is the frequent lack of authority, power, and accountability precisely because of all the rules, regulations, and procedures in place for acquiring IT […]

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Patterns of failure: how LucasArts fell apart

September 27, 2013 0 Comments
Patterns of failure: how LucasArts fell apart

Over at Kotaku, a Gawker Media web portal that covers computer games (a bigger industry than Hollywood, I might point out), Jason Schreier has an excellent article outlining the fall of LucasArts, once one of the most productive and successful video game companies around, but now no longer in existence. It is worth a careful […]

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Possible £200 million writeoff for Universal Credit — septic code problem?

September 13, 2013 1 Comment
Possible £200 million writeoff for Universal Credit — septic code problem?

I wrote last week about problems with the UK Government’s Universal Credit project, an attempt to do a system-wide replacement and re-engineering of IT systems for the Department for Work and Pension. The latest news article now states that the project has already written off £34 million and may end up writing off up to […]

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What is it with DMV projects?

September 10, 2013 1 Comment
What is it with DMV projects?

It seems that each year brings another story about a failed or very troubled IT project attempting to replace or re-engineer the computer systems for some state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. The latest is this well-researched and well-written article by Bruce Landis at the Providence Journal about the problems the state of Rhode Island has […]

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