Developers: Getting the big contracts

[Clinton]

I'm not a developer so I don't know how your world works, but ... how do you go about attracting the more lucrative contracts?

I mean, I know you can chase mom and pop businesses and convince them to pay you $200 to design a template specifically for them. There's no fortune awaiting you in that.

Was reading this BBC article today. It seems that some developers do very well indeed. Particularly those with government or local government contracts. The sky seems to be the limit with huge sums of money being poured down developers throats for shoddy, useless work.

The UK cabinet office has this breakdown for one government site:

£6.2m on strategy and planning, £4.4m on design and build, £4.7m on hosting and infrastructure, £15.3m on content provision and £4.5m on testing and evaluation. What I can't work out is why that cost is repeated for three years

Yup, they get paid for the design and build of the website every year after they've built it! Sounds like a nice piece of pie. How do you pull something like that off!?

OK, the site gets six million visitors a month. But, heck, that's not a lot in the big scheme of things. I've handled that kind of traffic on a couple of modest $200 pm servers.

Are you one of those fat cat developers? Care to tell other developers here how they can get in on a cushy number like this?

[Kay]

Don't get me started on the subject of government stupidity. My husband used to work for them (FCO) and at one time he was trying to cover three jobs because there wasn't the budget to hire more staff. Despite this lack of funding, we often saw money being thrown away on projects like this by colleagues back in London. IMO, it's shameful. And, as you say, it's often for shoddy, useless work.

Sometimes there are talented people within the organisation who could do a better job for a fraction of the price, but the Office always seems to prefer external "consultants" who cost a fortune. Why is that? I have some theories but I won't risk saying them here.

Thank goodness he's not working for them any more. Hey, just a thought... now he too could be an external consultant!

[tke71709]

Hey something I sorta know about on the forums, will wonders never cease?

I'm a consultant, and I almost exclusively work for the Canadian Federal Government on IT projects.

There are several big issues that inflate the price of contracts tremendously in government (IMHO).

1) The need for consensus. In the private sector Joe is in charge of a project, so Joe makes decisions and moves things forward. In the government, there is no Joe. You end up with a steering committee (multiple people who work in different sections that are touched by the issue). Those steering committees then have working groups, and sub-working groups that, in theory, actually propose things to the steering committees. Whether they actually do so is always a question but anyway. So a lot of time and money is expended trying to figure out what a project is actually about, and it ends up being a watered down version because consensus has to be reached. Just to make things more complicated, government is a very fluid environment from a personnel perspective so the members of the steering committee change a lot for any project longer than a year in nature. Add in the generous vacation time allotted and you make things even more complicated because people who's input is needed will often be off on vacation or working at their regular jobs (being a member of a steering committee is often an extra piece of work beyond your regular work schedule). So the beginning stages of a project often take forever, and talent (consultants) are often stockpiled to make sure that they are available when they are actually needed.

2) Change. You start with a watered down approach, you then have turnover in the decision makers. When the decision makers change, the decisions start to change as well. So 2 steps forward are often followed by 3 steps back. Beyond the decision makers if you have staff on your project then you can also expect them to turn over on a regular basis.

3) Lack of accountability. Screw up in the government, and nothing happens. Take a $5 million project and spend a billion dollars on it (and yes this has happened) and it will not negatively impact your career in any way. You can't get fired, no matter how incompetent you are, you can only get shuffled off to another project. If a project is over budget and behind schedule, then you just have to grovel a bit and more money will come your way. Government does not reassess projects (well rarely anyway), once something is started they will keep funding it because nothing looks worse than admitting defeat.

4) Lack of success metrics. There is nothing worse for a government project than to try and introduce success metrics. If no one has defined success then no one can call a project a failure.

5) Rules and laws. Government takes it's rules seriously, many of which the average developer doesn't know or care about. They build in levels of redundancy and security that are ridiculous at times. Want to change a setting on a server? Often not possible at all, but when it is possible it can takes you a dozen forms and justifications and several weeks for someone in the server section to action your changes.

6) Monopoly. Government often can't go out to the lowest bidder. If you want to run a server in the government, you have to use a internal government server shop to host your apps. Monopolies = higher costs. Here in Canada everything has to be in both official languages, if you want to get something translated you have to use the Translation Bureau (internal government shop). Guess what, they charge almost 4 times what a private sector vendor would charge for the same work (and best of all, they sub-contract a lot of their work to private sector vendors because they don't have enough staff to do all the work).

7) Staffing levels. For every project you'll have at least 1 project manager, 1 test team manager, 1 development lead, 1 writer, 0.5 graphic designer and for every 3 or so developers on the team you are looking at 1 tester, and 1 business analyst. Each of those will put you back six figures a year easily.

That's a few observations from my 10 years as a government consultant.

[Clinton]

Hey something I sorta know about on the forums, will wonders never cease?

I think you underestimate yourself.

once something is started they will keep funding it because nothing looks worse than admitting defeat.

So the trick is to get in cheap, promise the impossible and change the goalposts later?

Are you glad you are out of that now, Joel, or do you miss it?

[tke71709]

So the trick is to get in cheap, promise the impossible and change the goalposts later?

That is how all the big companies do it (we're talking multi-million dollar projects here).

They underbid knowing full well that once they get the contract they can pretty much do whatever they want.

For smaller contracts (single resource bids) what they will do is send in one person's CV that is absolutely incredible and once they win the bid they will inform the procurement arm that the resource is not currently available. Once they do that they can replace that person with another person so long as that other person meets the minimum qualifications for the position and pay them a lower rate as well.

As an example they send in my resume for a rated contract. I score 98 out of a possible 100 points and "win" the contract. I already have a contract so I decline the offer, the company can then hire someone who scored 70 points (the minimum ranking allowed) that would never have made the cut in the first place and pay them accordingly keeping a larger percentage in their pocket.

Are you glad you are out of that now, Joel, or do you miss it?

That is still 95% of my income, it's been such easy money for me for the last ten years that I haven't invested the time/effort/money in my sites and the such as I've always valued my free time and family time more than the extra money. Only in the last few months have I really looked at getting more serious about this with the cutbacks in government and sitting without work.

[benitez17]

I work for a government contractor with clients in the US and UK, and we operate a little differently than what tke described (though that is the norm for government contracting in my experience) because we sell everything on fixed price contracts, where we deliver software and provide annual support. Because of the nature of these bids, people can't really pull the stunts described above when trying to win new contracts, so generally the prices are more realistic, and the real competition is based around which proposal best meets the requirements of the government's request.

The ridiculous amount of overhead caused by regulations and several layers of management, the lack of any real direction or accountability, and wasted resources he described are all painfully accurate. The upside of the work I do is that from time to time, really interesting projects will come along where you can save the government millions or more by redesigning an old system to use new technology, or they have some need that requires the latest and greatest and you get to build it from scratch.

It's very interesting to compare bidding on these multi-million dollar contracts where the company will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a proposal to how people bid for work online where it's hard to find someone who will respond in complete sentences in fluent English. I originally got interested in working online because I figured I could make some extra money writing code in my spare time, and I was able to find somewhat reasonable offers without much trouble (around the same as my hourly pay rate at my full time job) and did some freelance work for a couple of people, but the cut-throat competition on elance and the other sites where people will offer to build Facebook or something like that for $500 or less and the mind-numbing nature of much of the work contracted out to me made me quickly realize that I would be better off just working for myself.

[rmills]

This thread caught my eye because I work for a Canadian federal gov't department. Tke is absolutely right about consulting firms doing whatever it takes to get their foot in the door. I'm guessing that it's made easier by the fact that to hire staff is a royal pain but to do a short term contract is much easier bureaucracy wise.

I've worked with a lot of consultants over the years, some great some not so great. It does get a bit frustrating when the not so great ones are making 2 to 3 times what I make. I'm not sure how it works in the UK but where I work I've known consultants who get in the door, start a project, drag it out as long as possible, make themselves "indispensable" by not documenting the systems they create etc and have their contracts renewed every year. Nice work if you can get it. :=)

[Clinton]

I work for a Canadian federal gov't department.

Yeah, but if you're here in these forums you can't be that bad

On a different note, I'll have a look through my site for sale submissions. I'm sure that yesterday I saw a submission of a .com (US based) "government vendor portal" whatever that is. I'll drop them a note and maybe start a thread about this in BSTE or the VIP Lounge.

[tke71709]

I've known consultants who get in the door, start a project, drag it out as long as possible, make themselves "indispensable" by not documenting the systems they create etc and have their contracts renewed every year. Nice work if you can get it. :=)

I know consultants who have been on the same contract on the same system for 15 years+ and all the knowledge is in their head so they'll never be let go.

[Clinton]

OK, I've posted that site for sale I was talking about earlier, FWIW.