[John Rogers]

Well Milt good luck with that! Most any "civil service" or government organization will not discuss any "non feel good" issues, even off the cuff as the person will be afraid the info will leak out. Of course it might depending on how exciting the story is.

As an example, in San Diego the city has spent millions and millions on an upgrade to their "antiquated" online water billing system. Why you ask when it had "worked fine for over 20 years" as the spoke person said but could not do some things that management wanted it to be able to do??! So a bid went out to migrate to SAP and the wining contractor bid completeness in a year (not realistic) and at the end of a year all the $$$$$ was gone and the city had to bring on SAP themselves to complete the task. It was done for lots more $$$$$ and then rolled out last spring and the complaints poured in, I.E. no user access, can not pay bill, water being shut off, bills show as unpaid, can not do electronic payments, etc, etc. The charming and beautiful spokes-lady said there might be a "few issues" but the new system did all that MANAGEMENT wanted now and it had PASSED 92.8% of the tests when complete!

So I tried calling the office in charge of all this to get some test plan info, thoughts on project management, tools used to migrate, etc. I teach business systems design for several colleges locally and told the folks that, but they would not speak to me at all about any issues and the one person did say they felt 92.8% was better than it had been! I asked if she would buy a car that was 92.8% okay and she hung up one me! So info can be hard to get at times.