Just because one team of developers could do something in 200 man hours doesn't mean you can't spend and bill 2000 for it.
And that's just development. Data migrations and user training/support are going to be massive issues if you replace or newly introduce a widely used system.
Yup. My employer is undertaking a massive IT project (many many many millions of USD), and it's my understanding that training accounts for over half of the budget.
It doesn't mean you should pay, or plan, to spend 20,000 man hours in meetings and devote huge chunks of your budget to expensive licenses for something that could take 200 man hours, especially when it's taxpayers money.
Sure there are unavoidable overheads but why does our government keep splashing billions on them and failing, with little accountability?
Training is going to be expensive, sure, but perhaps plow millions of pounds into that after the program is finished. Maybe don't use the same massive, costly consultancies that fail to deliver? The Obamacare website was a great example of this IMO. Costly consultancy failed to deliver, small agile teams brought in to save the day - if only a bit too late.
Here is the simplest example. Say you need a device that does X. Now, I can go down to the local hardware store and pick up a device that does X (and Y and Z) for $40. But the law is written so that I can't just buy it where I want, because I might be wasteful and I might buy it from my buddy. So instead, I have to put out a bid that says I want a device that can do X and only select whom ever wins a bid. But there are a lot of regulations in who can bid, so the local hardware store doesn't ever even try. So I say I want a device that does X, and I end up getting a couple offers, the best of which is a device that barely does X for $200. That is the best offer I receive, so I have to take it. So now I have a much worse device at a much higher cost. Now, multiply this with every single thing you need to pay for in a software project (including other software, licenses, hardware, manpower, even the paper to print specs on).
OK, after we did the bid, and that's the result, why can't i just go buy something if it's less than half the price ? even if i buy it from my buddy, as long as it fits ?
That's the theory anyway.
*I know UC is British and while I suspect they have similar constraints I won't swear to it.
Which, IMO, are extremely important investments in any 20,000-developer undertaking. Valve Software is famous for having a relatively flat hierarchy, but they also have ~330 employees.
And this is before the lawyers get involved with their reams and reams of regulations that all make your job more difficult. If you think you could just dump the database and load it on the new system think again, that's an unacceptable data risk, you need to broker all of the data through yet another system.
By the way you cost your employer a LOT more than your salary. There's taxes, rent on the building, utilities, equipment and supplies, support staff, overhead staff, yadda yadda.
2. Advertising/marketing budget is in there somewhere.
3. So are acquisitions (Oculus etc.).
4. Operational costs for their datacentres, ops staff etc.
> Whilst original estimates from the DWP planned for the administration costs for the rollout of Universal Credit were £2.2billion, by August 2014 this estimate was revised to £12.8billion over its "lifetime". The cost has since increased to £15.8 billion.[29] At that date only 7,000 claimants were receiving UC, although there are now over 175,000.
The cost of the rollout is £15.8B. Its customer base is currently 175K. There's no indication that costs won't increase when the customer base increases by an order of magnitude. Besides simplifying Facebook's business model and operations (akin to calling Google just a big web scraper), you seem to be underestimating what's up ahead for UC, or you seem to think that software is just built and then maintains its value and functionality with no future costs whatsoever.
That's an entire rollout which entails designing, building and operating a payments system in parallel with several different existing systems it replaces, all the extra non-dev staff needed to keep things running and identify who gets which payment entitlements when, and all the additional administrative costs, which presumably involves an awful lot of explaining to the public how their benefit entitlements have changed. Actual software development probably accounts for a relatively small proportion of that. The status quo admin costs £3.5bn per annum, so an extra billion a year actually isn't as big a deal as it sounds.
If we can simplify all that down to a "bloated Java app" then we can certainly dismiss Facebook as a PHP web forum and suggest that its running costs don't compare particularly favourably, even if it does serve an awful lot of ads.
Judging by the reports of delays and admin cockups, if anything the UK government has probably underspent.
> Richard Granger the former Director General of IT for the NHS, took up his post in October 2002, before which he was a partner at Deloitte Consulting, responsible for procurement and delivery of a number of large scale IT programmes, including the Congestion Charging Scheme for London. In October 2006, he was suggested by The Sunday Times to be the highest paid civil servant, on a basic of £280,000 per year
Deloitte are a cancer on society and business. Presumably he learned how to ruin companies there/
Seriously, someone fill me in please. How can a software project possibly ever cost more than a billion pounds? You could employ 20,000 software engineers full time for £50K ($70k) a year for that much, and I expect the number of engineers working on Universal Credit is much lower than that and paid less.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Credit#Costs