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Think Your IT Project is a Disaster? These Will Make You Feel Better

posted by martyb on Thursday November 12 2015, @07:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the schadenfreude dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

There are many ways to gauge satisfaction with a new computer system, but when the people who have to use it show up for work wearing red and declare it "Code Red" day, you probably don't need to bother with a survey.

That's exactly what's scheduled to happen this Thursday in the city of Hamilton, Ontario, where government workers plan to protest the one-year anniversary of a controversial new computer system.

Ontario's Social Assistance Management System (SAMS), installed a year ago this week by the province's Ministry of Community and Social Services, was supposed be a more efficient replacement for its outdated case management system.

It hasn't quite turned out that way.

Several tales of woe, but no deeper dive on causes, like scope creep.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @08:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @08:42PM (#262346)

    I am typing this on the hardware I wanted to use as a personal "file and everything else server" about a decade ago. My bother now brings that project up as an example of how I do not get things done.

    Scope-creep was a big one. The "everything else" part was a little too ambitious. It did not help that I was trying to support a heterogenous network enviroment. (Debain and FreeBSD both speak like different dialects of NFS (user and groups are stored differently)). It did not help that because I was taking so long, FreeBSD would come out with another version every 2 years (Debian too). Now that I am more paranoid, the lack of encryption concerns me as well.

    What really stalled the project was the "verify" step of offsite, verified back-ups. I was able to dump to DVD+R with little problem, but restore failed for reasons I have yet to determine. My best guess is that buffer underuns added up enough to use up the available disk space. I also no longer have plans to back up everybody else's work when they go and buy a computer with a TB hard-drive (running the latest thing from Microsoft of course).