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They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks."

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Re: They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks."

#61

Post by bluGill »

pjc50 wrote: post #60
bluGill wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be a fool to not ensure that things will go at least a little easier in even the worst case. The other option: cost plus bids (that is you pay their actual costs plus a fixed amount of profit) is even easier to game because you can add costs in so many ways. That is why most large bids are fixed cost despite that downside - they are much harder to hide extra costs in. There is no alternative to carefully wa…

> There is no alternative to carefully watching your suppliers Hence: inhouse.

You still have to watch your suppliers even when they are in house. Things change, but not the fundamental problems. In many cases out sourcing really is the better cheaper option (this seems to be when an expert can be a deeper expert because they do the same thing for multiple different groups)

Re: They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks."

#62

Post by captain_coffee »

amelius wrote: post #19
VladVladikoff wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m at the point where if I see an AI image at the start of an article I just back right out. It would be so much better if the author just didn’t include an image at all. What did this image actually add to the content of the post? If you’re just doing something for the sake of doing it you’ve lost the plot.

An image signals that the author put time and energy into the article and that they have an eye for detail. Even if it's an AI generated image because the author still had to pick a fitting image.

I am 100% convinced that you are either trolling or that your comment is explicitly made in bad faith.

Re: They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks."

#63

Post by PunchyHamster »

pjc50 wrote: post #27

> where we identify public servants with strong technical aptitude across government, bring them into dedicated product teams > The team’s approach was straightforward. Build working software fast. Put it in front of real users early. Collect feedback. Fix things quickly. Release updates every two weeks. > That’s a 95% cost reduction. Both systems instead of one. Delivered faster. With 643 users already on the platfo…

The original idea of doing it privately was that free market will compete for best solution at cheapest price but many, many, many projects later it ends up not being cheapest nor best, just ones that can navigate the politics and red tape best. And that before any kind of corruption gets involved.

It also gets very silly, like one public one that company I work won was literally just iterating the company that currently hosted their infra infrastructure, so the previous company automatically checks all the boxes and any new one have to fit that, and it went to silly degrees like describing clockspeed of CPUs that have to run it. We just gave them older servers that happened to have higher clocking CPUs so the requirement backfired badly on them.

And that is not even neccesarily malice on their party, they just didn't wanted to go thru PITA of migrating everywhere just because some pencil pusher required looking for vendors every few years "in case it will be cheaper".

Re: They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks."

#64

Post by chrisjj »

actionfromafar wrote: post #7
chrisjj wrote: post #2

I searched this report for "test". Result: none found. > what if a small team of public servants, equipped with modern AI development tools, built the replacement systems themselves? Next: bridges and brain surgery.

On the one hand, yes. On the other, procurement is so broken, that if their inhouse team is only marginally better, it's a win.

Good point. Beating lame ducks seems to be "AI"'s top use case.

Re: They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks."

#65

Post by WBrentWilliams »

I don't know... I read the article, and what I really saw was a simpler argument: The buy vs build decision had drifted so far to capture by vendor, where the vendor charged to gather the already in-existence in-house knowledge, that it was much cheaper to build in-house. The AI bits could be seen as a speed-up, but I think it more likely that those designing the new system were designing from pain. That is, they knew the pain points based upon years of intimate knowledge. No wonder the new system, stood up quickly, and quite possible still in MVP mode, is so popular.

In brief, the story isn't AI as an accelerant. It's someone finally letting loose their internal knowledge to build to spec rather than buy.

Re: They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks."

#66

Post by aaron695 »

pjc50 wrote: post #27

> where we identify public servants with strong technical aptitude across government, bring them into dedicated product teams > The team’s approach was straightforward. Build working software fast. Put it in front of real users early. Collect feedback. Fix things quickly. Release updates every two weeks. > That’s a 95% cost reduction. Both systems instead of one. Delivered faster. With 643 users already on the platfo…

[dead]

Re: They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks."

#67

Post by drfloyd51 »

bluGill wrote: post #51
pjc50 wrote: post #27

> where we identify public servants with strong technical aptitude across government, bring them into dedicated product teams > The team’s approach was straightforward. Build working software fast. Put it in front of real users early. Collect feedback. Fix things quickly. Release updates every two weeks. > That’s a 95% cost reduction. Both systems instead of one. Delivered faster. With 643 users already on the platfo…

You are missing the larger problem: it isn't a fixed capital cost you can put in the budget. Modern accounting (for some good reasons) counts different costs in different buckets. If you invest in a system, the cost should be spread out over all the years the system is in use. However if you investing long term we want to be sure it is worth the investment - there is a point where something is not worth the cost. For…

> and then we get to sunk costs: what if I put in 1 month and am only 1 day from the fix, should I quit now?

This is the wrong question. But one often asked because of the sunk cost fallacy.

The real question is: what if I am only 1 day from the fix, should I quit now?

Re: They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks."

#68

Post by pizza234 »

pizza234 wrote: post #52
m-i-l wrote: post #40

I think the use of AI is really missing the point here. The point is that small in-house teams can deliver a lot more quickly and to a higher quality and at a lower cost than large outsourced teams from the big consultancy companies. I've seen this over and over again (the problem is that large organisations often prefer to go the slow and expensive route with the big consultancy companies for a complex variety of re…

> I think the use of AI is really missing the point here. The point is that small in-house teams can deliver a lot more quickly and to a higher quality and at a lower cost than large outsourced teams from the big consultancy companies. This assumes that small in-house teams are inherently effective/efficient, which is not necessarily true. In this sense, the difference between proven engineering leads (as the article…

EDIT: the leads are, in practice, managing a small team, although their exact technical background is unclear ("experienced practitioners who know how to design and deliver digital products", not clear if they're professional software engineers).

Re: They Said It Would Cost $54M. We Said "No Thanks."

#70

Post by duxup »

pjc50 wrote: post #27

> where we identify public servants with strong technical aptitude across government, bring them into dedicated product teams > The team’s approach was straightforward. Build working software fast. Put it in front of real users early. Collect feedback. Fix things quickly. Release updates every two weeks. > That’s a 95% cost reduction. Both systems instead of one. Delivered faster. With 643 users already on the platfo…

And that requires good management too and sadly the public sector has a lot of really poor management /hr too.
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