The IBM Con Job

In an article I wrote a few weeks back, one of the subjects alluded to the JPMorganChase-IBM contract cancellation but didn’t want to provide any details (probably because he’d gotten his information second-hand).

That’s why I was inextricably drawn into a blog posting by Tristan Yates, titled, “How IBM Conned Our IT Execs Out of Millions.” Mr. Yates describes his work for an unnamed defense contractor (I’m guessing Northrop-Grumman from the description...), where he worked as a contractor in the project management office, “getting paid by the hour to help them with project planning, forecasting, status, and other PMO and IT advisory functions.”

The project he was involved with -- an enterprise-wide portal and knowledge management system -- already had the vendors lined up. IBM was to handle the portal. The lone IBM consultant on site (another one would show up occasionally) actually “spent most of his time selling.” Whenever a senior member of the client team had reservations about the vendor that had been chosen for a particular aspect of the job, the IBM guy was there to push IBM as “the solution to their projects.”

At one point, he looked up from the work to discover that a herd of IBM Global Services consultants had flooded the conference rooms -- at $325 an hour. Most were ordinary techies hired through a third-party job shop from Monster.com and Careerbuilder.

Mr. Yates provides plenty of detail about how the project went so wrong. What’s even more useful is his list of mistakes to avoid making, such as:

Check resumes of individual consultants. A $250+/hr consultant should be able to walk on water, and their resume should reflect that.

Painful to read (not because it isn’t well written). Good advice.