Reality check

Most large I.T. projects go wrong for the same reasons: because they tend to be run in a waterfall manner, using proprietary software, and implemented by hyper-scaler providers.

This means they can incurring enormous costs. In fact, a small team of talented people using open-source tools can often deliver far better outcomes, and at a fraction of the price.

If your cloud budget feels more acid-rain than silver-lined, or the cost of your E.R.P. system makes you wish you were going back to paper, then consider an alternative.

In our experience, the above thresholds are indicators, that your project may be doomed — or at least is likely to struggle — and run over-budget, over-time, and will ultimately not deliver what you actually need.

Of course, this rule-of-thumb isn't universal, and the thresholds vary depending on complexity. Large multinational companies do need to spend £10s-of-millions on their systems, and Waterfall can be made to work, if you have N.A.S.A.-level expertise, with corresponding resources.

Example

In this example, sadly-too-common, one single UK council, West Sussex (population: 892,000) has spent £40m (so far) on an Oracle system, for its "HR, procurement, and finance processes", to "enable automation and improved efficiency".

The Register write: "UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project", 27th January 2025:

West Sussex helplessly watches price tag go from £2.6M to 'oh my God' …

A UK council is set to use up to £25 million ($31 million) from the sale of capital assets such as property to fund an Oracle-based transformation project that has seen expected costs mushroom from £2.6 million to around £40 million…

Obvious mistakes include: buying proprietary software, procurement from large vendors (with highly talented lawyers, sales-people, and negotiators); not having a good internal I.T. team (or they would have done it in-house); poor project management; using waterfall; going-it-alone (there are 317 local authorities in UK, why not clone someone else's system?); conforming software-to-process, rather than process-to-software; poor oversight; no real accountability.

Using the rule-of-thumb above, the elected councillors (who are not I.T. experts, nor are they supposed to be) should have been able to use their oversight to say “this project has two more 'zeros' on the price-tag than it ought to, so please re-think the approach.”

There is a better way!

Ask the experts in open-source software, technology, physics and engineering.

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