As SC faces another $63M in fines, Dept. of Social Services pressed to finish child support project

[TexasTowelie]

COLUMBIA — Gov. Nikki Haley and a group of senators are pressing the state Department of Social Services to finish a long-overdue child support enforcement system project before its scheduled roll-out completion in three years, to save millions of dollars in federal penalties.

But DSS officials say they are as yet unsure whether accelerating the project makes good financial sense or would put too much risk on the agency.

Also Tuesday, DSS officials told senators that Anderson and Spartanburg counties remain "hot spots" for caseload problems and officials hope more workers and some caseload management consulting will address the problem.

The Senate DSS Oversight Committee has been pressing DSS since earlier this year to somehow shorten the time it will take to get the child support enforcement system, which has been in the works since the 1990s, operational.

Read more: http://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/local/south-carolina/2016/11/01/sc-faces-another-63m-fines-dss-pressed-finish-child-support-project/93103376/

[SouthernLiberal]

1. I saw this in the local news

I used to work as a programmer. For money, you know. If any project of mine or my co-workers took a tenth as long as this, no matter how big it was, someone would have been fired.

Honestly, though, I suspect that the problem is getting the 'users' to tell the tech staff what it is that they want.

[TexasTowelie]

2. I've been on both sides of the programmer/client relationship.

I was a stat analyst in the insurance industry, but I ended up testing and debugging COBOL programming when I was with the state and later on I ended up creating entire MS Access applications prior to Y2K. Since I was both the user and the programmer I brought projects in quicker and within a short period of time.

However, I did run into one project where I was initially told to create a policy rating engine for workers compensation policies. I know the algorithms to rate a policy better than the user did, but the scope of the project was poorly defined. What they actually wanted was a transaction system to replace the old mainframe system. The problem was that none of old data was migrated off of the mainframe so that when the policies were audited at expiration it would require the initial entries when the policy was written to be offset--there was no data available to offset so the original policy rating data had to be reentered. To top all of those problems off was that all of the data from the transaction system then needed to be transferred into a data warehouse (so I had to be able to distinguish which policies were originally rated on the mainframe against those rated on the replacement system). We only tested about 20 policies and the systems were not run in parallel to work out any discrepancies. It ended up being a humongous clusterf**k that required me to spend an extraordinary amount of time manually rating and correcting the transaction system and data warehouse, plus the user also had to do about three times the amount of work so she was upset at me. Considering that the only computer class that I had was Intro to BASIC in 1984 I felt particularly abused by the whole mess.