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Bureau of Meteorology asked to examine $96.5M bill for website redesign

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology-new-website-cost-blowout-to-96-million/106042202
16•OuterVale•46m ago

Comments

m4tthumphrey•24m ago
I cannot fathom this. What an egregious waste of (assumed) public money.

Surely someone can request to see where this went? Even the original figure of $4.1m is insane.

alcasa•21m ago
Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.
hyperpape•12m ago
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.

chrisrickard•5m ago
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•2m ago
This is pretty standard for Accenture and Deloitte.
TrackerFF•9m ago
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.

delusional•6m ago
Where did you get 11 members from?

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Bureau of Meteorology asked to examine $96.5M bill for website redesign

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology-new-website-cost-blowout-to-96-milli...
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