At our last 27Dinner meeting, we had Richard McClennan from Adapt-IT discussing the costs involved in the controversial R6.5m Durban 2010 website.
Quite simply, this is what he had to say…
- R6.5m is NOT JUST for the website
- R870,000 has been allocated to phase one of the website
- The rest is for infrastructure
- This includes Sharepoint Licensing
- Implementation of sharepoint within Etekwini Municipality
- Upgrading of systems within Etekwini Municipality
- Language translation of 60,000 at R1 per word into 5 different languages. And possibly more in the future.
I have done work with government departments in the past and what I have found is that what you get in the brief and what you have quoted for, often is not what you end up doing. So we included contingency amounts to cover us in the event that we go over and above the project brief. Out of the 5 large projects I worked on, every one of them went way over budget, in some cases, double the budget.
Most of us are pretty much apalled at the design of the site, well, you should be, because the design was not not by experts, it is what the customer wants. And with my experience in government work, I know that you cannot argue with them. The site’s inital designs were very cutting edge, but the client wanted simplicity. And that’s what they got, a simply boring website. Don’t blame Adapt-IT for that.
So if you look at the bigger picture, where the money has been allocated and how government works then it’s not as bad as the press has made it out to be.
I really want to commend Adapt-IT for being as transparent as they can, and for not letting this dog lie. They have actively gone out to explain themselves, and I can honestly say that is a lot more than what most government departments have done.
