Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
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Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#2I cannot fathom this. What an egregious waste of (assumed) public money.
Surely someone can request to see where this went? Even the original figure of $4.1m is insane.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#3I cannot fathom this. What an egregious waste of (assumed) public money. Surely someone can request to see where this went? Even the original figure of $4.1m is insane.
Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#4I cannot fathom this. What an egregious waste of (assumed) public money. Surely someone can request to see where this went? Even the original figure of $4.1m is insane.
Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.
I'm of two minds about this comment. A glance at the website suggests it has a lot of content and a full overhaul for 4.1m AUD (2.6m USD) might not be that that high of a price.
But the problem is with the assumption that the website needs a full overhaul. So often a full overhaul is where projects go to balloon in cost by 20x. An outside agency sells the leadership on a big picture full of fluff about "modernization" without any connection to real improvements.
A better approach would be to determine the most important weaknesses of the existing website, and incrementally improve them. But big organizations struggle with this. Government agencies are probably even worse than big corporations, but big corporations are terrible too.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#5Hopefully they'll go through all billed invoices with a microscope. My guess is that this will reveal outright fraud from the consulting firm(s), in the form of overbilling in hours.
Even if they bill $500/hr, and they billed 24 hours a day, that would come out to $4.38m / year for each consultant. That's a 11 member team billing 24 hours a day, all year round, for two years straight.
And if they billed more realistic hours, said team would blow up by many multiples. But of course, billed hours is not the only thing consulting firms will charge.
EDIT: For comparison, the website www.yr.no/en, has I believe 10 - 12 devs working. Maybe they've grown since the past years.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#6Hopefully they'll go through all billed invoices with a microscope. My guess is that this will reveal outright fraud from the consulting firm(s), in the form of overbilling in hours. Even if they bill $500/hr, and they billed 24 hours a day, that would come out to $4.38m / year for each consultant. That's a 11 member team billing 24 hours a day, all year round, for two years straight. And if they billed more realisti…
Where did you get 11 members from?
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#7I cannot fathom this. What an egregious waste of (assumed) public money. Surely someone can request to see where this went? Even the original figure of $4.1m is insane.
Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.
Because the ridiculous scope creep perhaps? And spending $96M of government money on an website (still with large faults that were backed out)
This was Accenture and Deloitte - not some backyard dev shop.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.
Because the ridiculous scope creep perhaps? And spending $96M of government money on an website (still with large faults that were backed out) This was Accenture and Deloitte - not some backyard dev shop.
This is pretty standard for Accenture and Deloitte.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#9Hopefully they'll go through all billed invoices with a microscope. My guess is that this will reveal outright fraud from the consulting firm(s), in the form of overbilling in hours. Even if they bill $500/hr, and they billed 24 hours a day, that would come out to $4.38m / year for each consultant. That's a 11 member team billing 24 hours a day, all year round, for two years straight. And if they billed more realisti…
Where did you get 11 members from?
Just a hypothetical. If you have a team of 11 devs billing $500 / hour, every hour of the day, all year round, that comes out to a hair over $48 million a year. Do that for two years, and you have the $96.5m bill. Not necessarily rooted in reality.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.
I'm of two minds about this comment. A glance at the website suggests it has a lot of content and a full overhaul for 4.1m AUD (2.6m USD) might not be that that high of a price. But the problem is with the assumption that the website needs a full overhaul. So often a full overhaul is where projects go to balloon in cost by 20x. An outside agency sells the leadership on a big picture full of fluff about "modernization…
Agreed. I'm a regular user of the BoM website, and from my perspective the old version was absolutely fine. I wasn't one of the people instantly panning the redesign, but after using it for a while I haven't found positives to outweigh the minor annoyance of the change, let alone justify the expenditure. I can totally believe there were some accessibility issues that I was oblivious to, but it's hard to imagine they couldn't have been fixed in a much narrower, cheaper way.
(It was slightly weird that the old website didn't support https -- but on the other hand, I can't really think of a realistic case where that mattered. And I reckon they could have sorted it out for closer to $0m than $100m.)