How does a project become late? Day by day

A friend prompted me towards Birmingham’s Local Council website yesterday. First looks show some fuzzy images with clarity problems and bad CSS. He also pointed out that the site is susceptible to XSS and that the search feature gives weird results (try searching DMV).

Digging deeper, I found that lots of sites have been discussing this over the last few months. The site was originally scheduled to launch in March of 2006 and would cost £580,000. Three and a half years later, the site was finally published costing taxpayers £2.8 million.

This sprang up several questions, but most importantly, who developed this website? I found several answers from this link: “The project is a joint one between the city and the city’s technology partner, Service Birmingham (the council’s joint venture with Capita)”. Capita is a company which specialises in out sourcing, which explains why the website took so long to finish.

Why did it take so long? The Birmingham Post expressed "fears of ridicule" over the project and suggested reasons for it's delay: "The launch was put back after officials discovered the software did not recognise pound or euro signs, apostrophes and quotation marks".

Outsourcing is used to lower costs by using a cheaper workforce, in another country. Though this often lowers costs, performance and usability usually decrease. Difficulties usually arise due to communication difficulty. Such problems damage conceptual integrity, causing a malformed conceptual construct.

The local government should have hired a local firm to produce the website; I'm sure it would have performed better and been cheaper!