Actually it may not be allowed. The budget is a funny thing. If you come under it once, it’s then always assumed that you’ll pad your budgets and thus you’re allocated less.

Of course it is not just throwing together some html and css. Yes, there is planning, design, build, evaluation and testing. But even with all that, there is no way that site should cost £35m.

Lets say, for the sake of argument, that the site cost £5m. That would be a lot but I could understand why, and the largest % would be on content. Keeping on top of the latest business information and putting it on the site in a coherent manner would take time and resources. But 7 times that much? madness and money down the drain.

I think @Daniel is correct when he talks about allocated budget. I bet the £35m was set aside a long time ago. It was allocated and had to be spent. Though why boggles me. Come in under budget, it is allowed for goodness sake!

It’s obvious that information flow is not fluent in the government. People who think they can solve that, “think different”, which means they solve shit, but not the obvious problem.

Real complexity as the organizational structure of how policy applies to information in a predefined flow direction, cannot be solved by just spending millions of dollars. There’s a need for real heads who solve complexity in a way that their solutions appears natural and simple.

If I learned something, then it is that simplicity is the mother of complexity.

*DARPA is going to jump in here probably..*

We’ve also been called in to rescue projects that shall remain nameless, however I found myself in a situation where the original developers had done nothing at all for their inflated price (in fact didn’t know how to do the job they had won). They bizarrely got away with being paid for a lot of it, despite having done nothing at all. There is a huge amount of money wasted, vast sums, so these figures would not surprise me at all. There are also plenty of projects that never get launched because of internal changes. and so work is just thrown away.

Three things need to be done in my view. Firstly the departments commissioning these sites need to get organised, they need to establish someone who is running the project and has sign off. A lot of the time these projects are a nightmare and cost more than they should due to too many people having a say, and the goalposts being constantly changed. Once all the requirements have been gathered and decisions there should be a single point of contact on the client side who controls things.

Secondly, departments need to be more open to working with smaller companies, rather than going to the same big agencies who will roll out the same (often not very good) work, and charge a fortune for consultancy. A high profile project will be very important to a smaller company, and they are more likely to really do a great and cost effective job.

Thirdly, it would be good to see some proper advice being taken when hiring companies for this kind of work. Not from expensive consultants, but by bringing in expert help at the tender/pitch process. A small panel of experts for a couple of days wouldn’t cost a fortune but could save a lot of money in the long run by weeding out the cowboys and the people who are charging what they think they will get away with.