Question

Recently a very embarrassed BBC abandoned a £100 million project that had been ongoing for
a number of years. Firstly go to the BBC News website at
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-22651126 to read the story. Watch both videos
and to answer the following questions,
a. In summary, what was the original project meant to deliver?
b. How long did it take before anyone knew there was a problem delivering the system?
c. From the description it is likely the system
was developed using a typical Waterfall
model? Given what you have heard and
read, do you think that a different type of
development would have avoided the large
financial loss? Give a full explanation for your answer

Answer 1

The BBC has apologised after spending nearly £100m on a project which has been abandoned. The Digital Media Initiative was set up in 2008 but was halted last autumn having never become fully operational.

The site is the work of a major outsourcing company called Serco, which has sub-contracted the technology to a little business called BT. So how do the costs break down?

The COI report has some detail - £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.

But I freely admit my knowledge of website development is sketchy so I consulted a couple of experts. One had helped build a customer support website for a major retailer, to cope with similar traffic to that experienced on the Business Link site. That had been built in-house but a supplier had quoted roughly £1.5m to build it, plus £150,000 in annual running costs.