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 realistic hours, said team would blow up by many multiples. But of course, billed hours is not the only thing consulting firms will charge.

EDIT: For comparison, the website www.yr.no/en, has I believe 10 - 12 devs working. Maybe they've grown since the past years.

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.

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...

“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.

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?