And so clearly was not only for design

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 increase the bill, every highly qualified consultant that is necessary for the project "needs" a lot of support personnel (senior consultants) so that the senior consultant can 100 % concentrate on their work (otherwise the customer would pay insane hourly rates for highly qualified experts to do "grunt work" - no customer would "want" that). This way, you sell a huge number of senior consultants (this is rather some low rank) to the customer.

And, by the way: since of cause many consultants you sell to the customer shall be highly qualified experts in their discipline, and the project trivially consists of a lot of disciplines, the number of subject-matter experts that can be sold to the customer can be increased by a lot. In some ordinary software project, you would simply use a small team of good generalists (jacks of all trades, master of none) who can do most things in the project, but of cause, as a consulting company, you rather sell the customer "some of the greatest experts that money can buy" (without mentioning that these are insanely expensive and not really needed for the project).

That's how you do it; scamming or billing unrealistic hours is for amateurs.

“It said the cost breakdown included $4.1 million for the redesign, $79.8 million for the website build, and the site's launch and security testing cost $12.6 million“

So 95% of that wasn’t from the cost of the website redesign. “$79.8 million for the website build” included the actual weather modeling and suddenly that number looks way more reasonable.

Classic case of project scope creep stretching what redesign means until you’re including a supercomputer as part of the bill of materials.

AT $250 an hour and 8 hours per day / 2000 hours per year, that's almost ~50 people years, which likely means a team of 10-12 devs working on it over 18 months with another 1-3 design and product and project people in the way making things look good until the bill arrived. Accenture is good at that. [0]

0 - https://australiatimes.com/australia-s-bureau-of-meteorology...

See, usually you don't have 11 developers coding 24/7. What you usually have is project managers, account managers etc and then a few people who code every now and then. Then you have licenses and support costs.

You can't just code the website, zip the code and mail it to the client. They have many stakeholders like this person needs to be able to show this that persin needs to be able to access this etc because they are running a business or service with than many people. Then you will have requirements like blind people should be able to use that and someone should be able to monitor all that. For each complication you will use specialized tools and do integration, i.e. Adobe will sell you one thing Oracle will sell you another thing and you will have to have people overseeing all these integrations and requirements etc.

That's why you have thousands of employees in tech companies with seemingly a simple product that you can fully code in a week(at least the user facing part of it).

Where did you get 11 members from?

Of course one really ‘unbelievable’ thing is that this infrastructure upgrade contract (including the website) was actually initiated and approved by the previous Government (since voted out to opposition) that Littleproud was part of back in 2017…

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.

This is a huge issue in my experience. I've done some work as a government contractor and often the govt offices have been so heavily outsourced there's nobody left with any technical knowledge at all to oversee the projects. Like the most technical person literally doesn't know what a git repo is.

Even if you hire good contractors who work in good faith, the inability to have remotely technical discussions leads to all kinds of miscommunication and mismatched expectations.

Building and maintaining more in-house developers would be vastly more efficient for the govt, but so many people have a religious level hatred of public employees and glowing respect for private ones. So we not only end up in the current situation, it's actively being made worse in the US by the current administration.

Ok great, in-source the project but we’ve been promised a yearly headcount increase of exactly 0. Any hires above that require the minister to sign off.

In your team you have, 3 data scientists that have never worked on a software project, an intern who likes computer games and a PM that used to work in the tax department.

This is a 12 month project, everyone needs to also do their own job and if it’s late, they’re coming for all of us in next years budget.

What would you do? The correct answer is to pay an external consultancy to take the heat and an external team to get the right people needed to get it done.

Another POV is that if you had to cost out a finished product ahead of time, that’s what it costs.

Startups and small teams fail before they’ve spent $100m on product development. The scenario you describe never happens.

You could argue instead for incremental development, but if they’ve already decided they need this whole stack of products (it’s $100m for a backend, supercomputer code, etc) why delay and make it more expensive?

I don’t know a lot about weather websites. For video game engines, I know Unity has put more than $3b of product development into the engine. That’s a lot of money. And they’re still not “finished.”

Anyway, the worst part of the discourse is the jail time thing. Pray tell, who the hell is going to feel passionate about programming for the government if their peers are threatening jail time over budgets? One of the reasons we get to enjoy high standards of living in the west is that we pay for consultants, like expensive secondary medical staff, programmers, etc, instead of only tangible things. In your world, the only big government expenditures that are permissible are roads and shit. It is the very same energy as tariffs, this belief that the only valid labor is manufacturing. It’s dumb.

It has data-drupal attributes in the source. Not sure where the Perl and Java things would have come from.

5 person team, 5 overheads (dealing with the government no less), 200k/yr each that’s 2m a year + 50% margin would easily get you a 4m burn rate.

Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.

Yes, but what special relations do you have with the purchasers?

From the linked article:

> It said the cost breakdown included $4.1 million for the redesign, $79.8 million for the website build, and the site's launch and security testing cost $12.6 million.

In the UK, the Met Office is part of the military, for historical reasons.

There were none. There is a separate sub-site for military consumers. It has its own challenges, but they are not primarily related to security.

People rely on this for safety as well as economic activity like agriculture etc.. As bad as the site redesign is, we even more don’t want a crappy vibe-coded site when incorrect weather warnings could kill a lot of people or cause economic damage!

Fixed price? Shake on it LOL

- That "weather website" has to serve all of Australia.

- It's got to be usable on big screen desktops, tablets, smartphones.

- It has to have an uptime of what I estimate to be 99.99%. As the article says, farmers will pitchfork you if you can't tell them when rain will hit their fields.

- It has to be slinging dynamic image data to (about) every visitor.

- The data comes from somewhere. You're lucky if they have that under control already. Probably not.

I came up with these aspects, not knowing anything about what the "Bureau of Meteorology" actually needs in a website. It's just common sense speculation.

The Australian government eagerly awaits your expert advice.