31–40 of 86 posts
> complete rebuild was necessary to ensure the website meets modern security... requirements > launch and security testing cost $12.6 million What are the challenging security concerns for a weather website? And why would testing alone cost $10+ million?
Hopefully 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…
I doubt that the consulting firm seriously overbilled. To my knowledge rather consulting firms are great at selling the necessity of lots of consultants or consultant days: Just let the customer talk very openly about their wishes for the project, and you immediately get an insane scope explosion for the project, i.e. it "needs" an insane amount of consultants over many years to implement all these wishes. To increas…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, here is another realistic hypothetical: a team of 10 devs billing $500/hour, plus extra "package" fees for subject matter expert review, machine learning experts advice, senior partner reviews, focus group experiments, A/B test monitoring, regulatory compliance lawyers, all coming at extra cost. You will find that they can milk that cow legally in much more imaginative ways than your calculation.
Exactly this. At least in the US, consultancies that contract with the gov’t can keep a small full time staff in order to qualify for small-business preference and keep their overhead low, and then depend on an army of subcontractors for large projects.
> "It is unbelievable a private consultancy was paid $78 million to redesign the website," Mr Littleproud said. This is the crux of the issue. If you have outsourced software engineering competency, yet one of your core missions is maintaining a large pile of software, then this is the inevitable result.
The private consultancy likely outsourced pieces of the work to (far) lesser-paid subcontractors, too. I would imagine the margins on that project to be astronomical.
My primary source of business is customers who paid a lot for they and didn’t get what they asked for and then the vendor blames it all on their subcontractor, or expects more money at astronomical rates. For example $200 an hour for basic WordPress customisation.
> complete rebuild was necessary to ensure the website meets modern security... requirements > launch and security testing cost $12.6 million What are the challenging security concerns for a weather website? And why would testing alone cost $10+ million?
In the UK, the Met Office is part of the military, for historical reasons.
Half-seriously, it does kinda send a signal that such a function for government (meteorology) is so essential, that it stayed lumped in with another important function of government (military/defense). I think its not a bad idea! I admit to not knowing any details at all for how its actually run in the UK...but i contrast that with the severe gutting of budgets of essential agencies in the U.S....and yet again, feel envious of other countries. (Well, maybe not envious of whomever approved the contracts for the AU BOM website, but still envious in other areas.)
> complete rebuild was necessary to ensure the website meets modern security... requirements > launch and security testing cost $12.6 million What are the challenging security concerns for a weather website? And why would testing alone cost $10+ million?
In the UK, the Met Office is part of the military, for historical reasons.
The old site provided with HTTPS: https://reg.bom.gov.au
Anyone rubber-stamping that sort of invoice deserves jail time.