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

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chrisrickard 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	radicalbyte 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is pretty standard for Accenture and Deloitte.

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hyperpape 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	retsibsi 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.)

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blitzar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Given the salary of devs

Devs are shocked to hear that their 500k salary makes the project cost more than a 50k they think it is worth.

	▲	moron4hire an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Hahahaha, right. I wish. No developer in consulting is getting paid $500k. Jesus, people hear one tidbit about prestige staff engineer positions at Microsoft, Meta, and Google, and then assume we're all getting those numbers.