Should You Kill That IT Project?

 

The big news from the FBI in January 2005 wasn’t the capture of a top criminal. It was about the potential scrapping of a $170 million computer system that was planned to enable the FBI to better manage criminal and terrorism cases.

A report by the inspector general found that the almost three-and-a-half-year-old project was unable to meet the FBI’s case management needs. FBI officials said that for the system to become useful it would need a lot of work and would incur substantial additional costs, which means that it may be more prudent to scrap it completely.

The system, known as the Virtual Case File, is supposed to transfer large amount of investigative information into digital databases that would be available throughout the FBI. However, the system had design problems that, according to the inspector general’s report, were due to bad planning and management.

Virtual Case File was to be the last piece of the FBI’s Trilogy project, intended to overhaul its old systems. The parent project itself is encountering cost overruns and delays. Budgeted for $381 million, it already has consumed $200 million more than what was planned. At the moment, it is unclear how much more money and time would be needed to launch the case management system.

Killing an IT Project
It is a common complaint against IT projects that most of them cost more than …

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