"From A Dud To A Stud In Less Than 14 Months"

   Rob Clopp, the outgoing Chief Information Officer at Social Security, is proud of what happened with the Disability Case Processing System (DCPS) under his watch. From Federal News Radio:

The Social Security Administration has turned its disability case processing system from a dud to a stud in less than 14 months.

Over the previous four years, SSA had spent almost $300 million for software and had little to show for it.

Rob Klopp, the Social Security Administration’s outgoing chief information officer, said SSA did a complete turnaround with DCPS by taking over the management of the project, applying an agile or dev/ops approach and listening to their customers at the state level.

SSA launched the first iteration of DCPS on Dec. 16 and expects to continue updates and deployments throughout 2017.

 “This time through, we accomplished more for a fraction, really a small fraction of the spend of the previous attempt, and deployed a production actually in December that is now processing cases, end-to-end real life cases,” Klopp said on Ask the CIO. “We’ve completed this 14-month project for a little over $30 million. It was a giant, giant success. By the way, it’s also a fraction of the original estimate, which was not counting that this thing blew up.”

SSA first hired Lockheed Martin and MicroPact to modernize the Disability Case Processing System in January 2011 under a six-year, $200 million contract. ...
By 2014, Klopp said he joined SSA and the program was in trouble and spending well above the initial $200 million estimate.

“The vendor was always one release away from victory, and it just never came,” he said. ...