January 13th, 2009
Miami-Dade school district and Deloitte: 'Endless money pit'
Deloitte seems to hit the IT failures radar with some frequency. Miami-Dade school district’s (MDCPS) SAP implementation is the most recent Deloitte project to come across my desk. Although this implementation is clearly running late, the extent of delays is ambiguous.
Teachdade.com notes:
How far behind schedule is MDCPS’s BOSS project? Depends who you ask. According to KPMG, the company hired by the district to audit its floundering software overhaul, the project is running “approximately four weeks behind schedule.” Deloitte Consulting, the company charged with implementing BOSS, echos the one-month lag. But in a Nov. 7 memo to the School Board, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho says BOSS is as much as four months behind.
Then again, if you ask TD, none of the three billion-dollar institutions has it right….[I]t appears that Carvalho has missed the mark by a half a year.
The June 2008 video shows former Miami Deputy Superintendent of Business Operations, Ofelia San Pedro, assuring Board member, Renier Diaz de la Portilla, that the project will remain within budget. Renier calls the project an “endless money pit” while Ofelia offers a spirited defense.
Ofelia states the project is within budget, but appears to also say planned scope was cut to achieve this goal. Reducing scope is a common tactic to mask budget overruns, by “pretending” the project is smaller than originally scheduled.
Given the ambiguities, we will definitely see more of this one.
[Via an anonymous reader submission. No party in this dispute blamed SAP, according to my research to date.]
Michael Krigsman is CEO of Asuret, Inc., a software and consulting company dedicated to reducing software implementation failures. Click here to discuss this post with him on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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