Lessons Learned (And Not)

by Robert N. Charette

Early last year, the FBI finally cancelled its Virtual Case File (VCF) system project after spending more than US $100 million on it. As I wrote in the Executive Update "Eyes Wide Open [1]," the causes of the VCF failure were classic, legion, and depressingly familiar: during the course of the project, there were several different CIOs and numerous different project managers; the basic purpose of the system shifted following 9/11 from supporting a criminal investigation to a counterterrorism mission; change requests averaged 1.3 per day; there were 36 contract modifications; and on and on.

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Lessons Learned (And Not)Tue Nov 15 19:25:28 CST 2005