141–150 of 153 posts
I've heard of large SIs charging millions for discovery work, only for the report to say the budget is not enough to build the project.
Never mind the standards orgs tendering needs to meet (ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus). It's not for the faint-hearted.
It would be great to see the cost breakdown. 4m might seem a lot or not dependending on what was delivered
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/s
For your comment or mine? I'm happy to share. All the same, you can have a long successful careeer, but you say nice things about Nigel the one time and forever after they'll call you a goat f*r and throw milkshakes on you :/
At my last company (a telco that was government previously) they wound up paying $3 million for barely more than a Drupal theme for the public website. Fun project to be on. We played “descope” bingo… but everyone won all the time.
what was the barely more?
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For your comment or mine? I'm happy to share. All the same, you can have a long successful careeer, but you say nice things about Nigel the one time and forever after they'll call you a goat f*r and throw milkshakes on you :/
My comment was sarcastic
This is pretty normal for government procurement, though. and in fact, most large organisation procurement. There's a whole wall of standards that the supplier must meet, e.g. ISO9000 that your little web-dev shop almost certainly doesn't. They won't buy from a supplier that is likely to go out of business. There's a ton of other criteria that you've got to meet to get the business. If there's any , even the slightes…
I don't doubt you're correct about the incentives, but one point seems amiss... > If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business. You don't think that spending £4.1 million on this garbage might reflect badly on someone?
For us techies who know the tech (or even the law, in this case) this is a disaster. But for the folks in those meetings this is what they understood to be the brief.
If enough of the public gets ahold of the story so that a politician has to get up on their hind legs and issue a statement, then harsh words might be had. But otherwise, this is business as usual.
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In the tender there's one line: > IV.1.8) Information about the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) The procurement is covered by the Government Procurement Agreement: Yes Googling the UK Government Procurement Agreement got me to: > https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-standar... which was when I realised this was a rabbit hole and while I am positive that somewhere deep in that rabbit hole would…
It's there in the The Model Services Contract, under Core Terms: > Quality Plans > 6.1 The Supplier shall develop, within [insert number] Working Days of the Effective Date, quality plans that ensure that all aspects of the Services are the subject of quality management systems and are consistent with BS EN ISO 9001 or any equivalent standard which is generally recognised as having replaced it ("Quality Plans"). The…
What is funny is that I know plenty of great engineers that won't earn $4mil ever in their life. For that amount of money you could give 4 guys $1mil each to create an amazing resource and take care of it for the next 30 years. I wonder how much PwC will charge for ongoing hosting and maintenance.