Why the City of Vancouver website Cost $3 million

August 9, 2012

Posted by Vancity Buzz | 42 »

There was quite the firestorm yesterday about the City of Vancouver’s “3 million dollar website”. On the surface it sounds insane to spend that much on a website and I agree if that’s all you were buying, but it’s not. Sure that’s what it looks like on the surface and the assumption by most is that the old site was one seamlessly working system that managed its content, was connected to the city’s services, like buying a dog license, paying parking tickets, and community centre activity calendars.

The reality, however, is very different, and was most likely a tangled mess of disparate systems that were up to 15 years old. That likely meant an endless amount of effort and workarounds to just keep the site up and running, let alone publishing new content. This was not a simple matter of grabbing the old content, polishing it off and stuffing it into a WordPress site like many on Twitter have suggested. The other thing to consider is that as the city site grew over time. Sections and content were bolted on with little or no global strategy on how all the pieces fit together in one master plan.

Ultimately, it was a comprehensive reassessment of:

Content: how it could be more relevant or accurate and up to date
Workflow: how all of the content was published by all of the civic departments
Usability: what could be made more user friendly and how?
Technology: what system would best power the site

Requirements gathering

I can only imagine the amount of effort it would take to gather all of the new requirements from all of the city’s various departments. Probably six months to a year alone of requirements gathering, then obtaining broad consensus within a large bureaucracy on the strategy moving forward. Add to that the inevitable revisions and debates. It all adds up to considerable amounts of time and money spent. But well spent. A huge project like this makes the entire organization, or city in this case, realize how poor and dated their content is in the first place. And without a content plan you can’t even begin to map out what the site is going to actually be and, more importantly, do for potentially millions of users.

Planning & Usability

Once all of the requirements and content plan are in place there needs to be a plan on how it all comes together in the site. This takes a ton of planing; asking questions from users, usability design, and testing. You could easily add another three months in this phase of the project.

Design

Now comes visual design which is a delicate balance of look and feel and what actually works well from a usability perspective. Design is always subjective and you can burn through many cycles of redesigns. But I suspect in the case of the City of Vancouver’s site, this was actually not one of of the larger costs.

Development

There is plenty of debate about whether or not the city chose both the best and most cost effective platform. One could easily argue that they did choose one of the most expensive proprietary web technologies out there, one based on a licensed Microsoft platform. There are certainly much cheaper options and I can’t claim to know why that discussion was made. Many IT departments write the website specifications and quite often it ends up being Microsoft’s offering. Typically, it can cost upwards of $200/hr for an outsourced agency to program in this language. But it is often the only option due to resourcing issues within an internal IT department for a project of this scale.

This is not just a website, but rather a custom built technology platform that has to replace many antiquated systems and needs to incorporate many different processes and functions. You also have to consider where that data was initially being stored and processed, as well as whether or not it could be leveraged or had to be levelled and recreated from scratch based on efficiency of workflows and technologies. In the latter case, it would need to be custom built from scratch, resulting in more than a few months of development.

ROI

I am not hearing much discussion about the return on investment either, to be frank. The return on investment was most likely calculated in the initial budget and I suspect that the sum total of reduced systems, processes and manual labour required to keep the site up to date and running smoothly will be vastly reduced in just a few short years. I also suspect the manual labour costs for keeping the former site’s code up to date were huge.

A civic website is now the main conduit in which the public interface with their local government. As such, it should function well on all fronts, including some of the following:

Delivering the latest and most accurate content for all aspects of local government, including dynamic calendar and scheduling applications for things like community centers and other programs
Housing and managing all of the historical data and minutes from council meetings
Storing and cataloguing council documents
Housing all rezoning applications
Documenting all processes that you may be required to do for any number of things, including:

◦ Fire regulations

◦ Rules around your responsibility for curbside garbage collection

Producing live updates and maps on road construction
Making it easy to contact the right official for maintenance of trees in parks and on streets
Viewing your property tax balance
Offering online payment systems for:

◦ dog licences

◦ parking tickets

Being easy to use and navigate
Being easily extendable for future additions
Integrating with all or most of the city’s backend systems
Seamlessly publishing workflows on the backend that reduce time and labour involved.

Was $3 million too much to pay for a web platform as complex as one required for a city of this size?

It really depends on how you look at it. From what I have been seeing in the press and social media, little beyond look and feel and platform are being discussed.

Could it have been done for less?

Absolutely it could have. But whether or not it would have done the job properly we will never know. There are many approaches that could have been taken, some more progressive than others. But the approach that Vancouver took with its agency’s is pretty standard for a project of this size and scope.

Was it worth the money?

This will be up to the politicians,bureaucrats and, ultimately, we taxpayers, to determine and make public. I would hope that ROI was always in the plan.

At the end of the day the city has a new web platform that if designed correctly should last at least another 15 years.

The following was a guest post by JP Holecka.

JP Holecka is the creative strategist and owner of POWERSHiFTER, a Vancouver digital marketing agency, that serves a diverse list of clients that includes Energizer, the Vancouver Canucks and TELUS.

http://twitter.com/Phanyxx ♔ Nick Routley

The uproar surrounding this is reminiscent of the London 2012 logo. People were saying “I can’t believe they paid £400k for a logo”. What they fail to understand is that cost is for the entire visual identity of their Olympic Games. Ask anyone who worked on Vancouver 2010′s visual identity. It’s a herculean task.
http://twitter.com/lynneux Lynne Polischuik

Nicely put, JP. While I agree that it’s fair to question execution and perhaps the way the site was launched (with little offered in terms of actual benefits or the explanation you’ve offered here) I don’t think cost was wildly out of line for a web project of this size.
http://twitter.com/driftwood78 Shaun Smakal

The uproar I remember was not the cost, but the cost relative to what is, in the end, one of the top five worst visual identities ever created in the history of man.
NYC_YVR

While I get the post by JP Holecka, I just don’t see how, why the City of Vancouver thought that is what a good budget idea to go ahead with this plan. With all the cuts that have been going on and still no final tally on what the Olympics cost( yes it was great for the city..blah..blah..blah), WHY would they go ahead . I am in the business too and I understand all the nuances in building a front and backend of a website that has pieces that has been hacked together over the years. It’s hard for me as a taxpayer to justify this amount..Just being honest!!
http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

I guess you missed the bit about ROI?
Raza Mirza

“Many IT departments write the website specifications and quite often it ends up being Microsoft’s offering. Typically, it can cost upwards of $200/hr for an outsourced agency to program in this language”

As a formal Microsoft employee and an expert in this language are you talking about, I would like to know how you came up with $200/hr. Apart from Microsoft itself, I have worked for some of the highest paying tech companies as a programmer, and there is no way $200/hr is justifiable. Plus your claim that often developer end up using Microsoft’s technologies is false.
NYC_YVR

I didn’t. Just a little pissed about it
http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

Pissed about cost savings?

If a cut isn’t the solution, then improving efficiency is. Improving efficiency quite often has an upfront cost.

If there isn’t any ROI on a redesign then it should never be commissioned. I’d be a little surprised if this isn’t the case here. Politicians like fancy events like the Olympics irrelevant of the ROI – but I can’t imagine them splurging on an unneeded website.
Vanchica

So the fact that it was poorly palnned and executed (which is what I get from his apologist explanation) means it just had to cost that much. I call shenanigans. This was a boondoggle.
http://twitter.com/incredimike Mike Walker

Just a random thought: I believe many people are thinking the *website* cost the $3M, when it was actually the *entire project*. Consider licensing, support contracts, hosting, training, workflow discovery/modifications, advertising, meetings, phone calls, travel, etc.
http://www.powershiftermedia.com/blog jaypiddy

Thanks for the comments and as I mentioned on Twitter, our agency had nothing to do with either the RFP or the project in any way shape or form. We have lots of experience in large tech and web projects of this scope and nature and I wanted to add a voice from a provider’s perspective. Like I mentioned there were most likely less expensive ways to do it from a tech choice but I suspect not by much. If you were completely gutting all of the systems and processes attached to a civic site like this then the planing and strategy one of the most expensive components regardless of tech. Let’s face a new major website that costs any amount of money is going get the conversation going. I also think the city could have done a much better job explaining the scope and roi projections of the site.
Johnny Canuck

This is typical Vancouver. The backward thinking politicians spend a tonne of money on a project that is clearly overpriced.

People get angry as $3m on this project is insane. Then the blinded Vancouverites step in to defend this project. No matter what they had in mind in terms of planning, the website still looks like shit. The City was dumb enough to fall behind and have a jumbled web mess thanks to their legacy sites, which is just another indication they have no idea what they are doing at City Hall.

I’ve seen other city websites, like Victoria’s that has been very clear and usable for many years. This is just a sad project that looks like a jumbled mess.
JonnyCanuck

Amen!
http://doriantaylor.com/ Dorian Taylor

If vancouver.ca exhibits a failure of anything, it’s a failure of
rhetoric and/or political engineering, evidenced by the existence of
this debate. Whether it was worth the money remains to be seen and won’t
be obvious for quite some time.

Investment in information infrastructure is biased toward value
generation rather than cost-cutting, at least from the point of view of
the entity investing in it. As for being a public resource, it very much
is about reducing everyday costs incurred by local residents. If it
saves a million three-dollar incursions over its lifetime, or a hundred
thousand $30 incursions, etc., it will be successful. Likewise, if it enables people to do things they couldn’t previously have done, it will exhibit value there, and to date I’m still not sure how you calculate the ROI on that.
Johnbc

There is no way it would cost $3 million, that is just insane, and a terrible way to spend taxpayer money. I am wondering if one of the people who approved this project might have some sort of financial interest in the web design company that was contracted to build the site.
http://twitter.com/DanielCook604 Daniel

Lol, people here are extremely ignorant and have no clue how much a project like this would cost. I’m a project manager for an extremely large financial institution… One of the biggest in the world, and our public website re-design was 5 million dollars. This was a steal of a deal.
http://twitter.com/DanielCook604 Daniel

Your $20.00 dollar an hour php design is a bit low caliber for the type of project the city of vancouver required…. Just sayin.
Danielcook111

Lol, you’re halarious
Raza Mirza

If companies like google and facebook can use php, I believe the city would have done just fine. Besides the last time I checked ASP.net development didn’t cost $200 an hour, unless the city hired Microsoft itself to do the project. Just saying.
Raza Mirza

So you are saying that the city’s website was as complex and large as that of one of the biggest bank in the world. Says a lot about you project estimation skills.
Raza Mirza

So you are saying that the city’s website was as complex and large as that of one of the biggest bank in the world. Says a lot about you project estimation skills.
http://www.masey.com.au Masey

Congrats on rising above the knee-jerk rhetoric to present a thoughtful piece that considers the scale, usability & ongoing functional future-proofing of such a site.

While I’m not a huge fan of the design aspect myself, I do appreciate the investment required to deliver a site that provides so many time and money saving online tools, to so many users on a daily, or more frequent, basis. I can’t help but wonder if the $3million spend would seem so “on-the-nose” if a majority of those speaking out so vocally in social media circles, took the time to consider the value of the new site design beyond simple pixel placement.
http://twitter.com/Julia_JJ Julie Johnston

You’d think with that budget they could have allocated a smidge toward making the site responsive – if the platform is intended to last more than 15 years, I shouldn’t have to pinch and zoom to see it on my phone. Requirements, planning, usability, design and development phases all dropped the ball.
http://twitter.com/mtimofiiv Mike Timofiiv

What an uninformed thing to say, Daniel – PHP ranges in development cost and skill just like .NET. If you hire some guy from freelancer.com or off of craigslist for as little money as possible, the quality of work will be what it is, whatever the language/framework. That being said, $200 is still steep for quality work.
Meathead

It’s also worth mentioning that engineering a website platform that will last for 15 years is a massive undertaking, almost to the point of inevitable failure. Long-term foresight in the web development industry is a mix of mostly luck, blind faith, and wasted money. I would only hope the $200/hr rate is for a development team, since no language or technology – proprietary or not – would justify such a steep price tag. Unless of course you’re speaking of product managers, bureaucratic jugglers, cost shifters, or task fluffers.

I should note that underneath my comment it reads “Showing 24 of 23 comments”. No website is perfect because humanity is not. Hence why a team of accountants can never properly estimate a project’s budget.
nikkles

Too bad the project took so long. It must have started before responsive sites were the way to go. It is useless on a phone.
Vince

The City of Coquitlam website costs 260k and does the same thing. Is the Vancouver website 12 times better? Why is it at 3 million? Do the people make decision have a personal interest in the contracts?

I want an itemized line item for what has been spent on. Give me back my tax money
Danielcook111

There’s a reason you’re just a developer… Hush now little boy
http://twitter.com/MarkBusse Mark Busse

Have you seen the new website the City of Calgary launched last year? Pretty good, right? $3.2 Million bucks. Yup. http://www.calgarysun.com/2011/08/08/city-spins-new-32-m-website

Mind you, that is a mobile-friendly site, which by my way of thinking is sort of ‘ticket to the dance’ stuff these days. How the Vancouver site made it this far without be responsive or a mobile version confuses me.

Good news though! Vancouver city council approved Andrea Reimer’s motion to invest more time and budget into the design and development of a mobile ‘City App’ citizens can use to access the same info that is available on the new website from their smartphones. That makes sense, right? Wait, what? http://www.straight.com/article-601651/vancouver/vancouver-councillor-proposes-launch-mobile-city-app
Raza Mirza

Awww!!! I stepped on the poodle’s tail. The last time I checked your bank was offering blank cheques to my company’s developers, which by the way they still rejected, some people just don’t like a collar around their neck. Now go fetch some sticks.
http://www.wishbone-design.de/ Gertrud Schrenk

This must be a joke! 3 mill !
Where are the many disparate systems mentioned which had to be brought together? The interactive parts are very limited…
The old website had to be kept running while developping? The new website could have been done on a testing server and after being complete, moved to the working server…

Usability is very bad, small text, dense line-heights, stuffed pages, “text desert”, old fashioned design, no downgrading for non-css3 browsers (even IE8!!), non-responsive, no javascript enhancement for convenience…
The list is endless.

Of course, there is a hell of a lot of management to bring the huge amount of content together! But that doesn’t justifiy 3 mill…
http://twitter.com/nictinworth Nic Tinworth

3mil and they couldn’t design responsive? There isn’t even any mobile optimisation! Total fail.
Kael

200% overspent tax payer dollars. Having spent 15 years in the business of web design, development and online marketing, working with global house hold brands with some sophisticated integration and systems, this sounds either a poor planned project from a financial and vendor selection and lack of due diligence. The positive point is the city is consistent with overpaying and blowing tax payer dollars..Olympic village ring a bell?
One day the federal, provincial and municipalities will be governed like a business – not a bottomless expense at taxpayers.
Jimmy J

Great points all. I think part of the problem is that we have to infer the ROI versus it being communicated publicly.

Compared to City of Burnby’s SAP implementation which is many millions and many millions over budget, this is a steal!

When TELUS walked away from project managing the CoB implementation, you knew you had a dog!
Ted

$200 may be quite high even if it is the actual number.

There are a few things to consider here Raza:

- Let’s say City of Vancouver is to hire IBM or Telus
- IBM or Telus will outsource some of the work to sub-contractor
- Let’s say the sub-contractor charge $100-$120/hour
- IBM or Telus would like to make a nice profit out of it, let’s say they add their cost: $80-$120 because it’s their top people we’re talking about here who do the negotiation, project planning, organizing all parties

Don’t forget that the sub-contractor is typically a consulting company that may have similar structure:
- Let’s say they charge $100-$120/hour
- Let’s say their developer cost them $25 ($50k)-$35($70k)/hourly
- Let’s say they also have to consider their own PM and Management that do the communication with clients and organizing everything internally, this could cost another $30-$40/hourly.
- The sub-contractor would like to make a profit as well wouldn’t they?

Then there’s a question why the City of Vancouver doesn’t just go to the sub-contractor? Well, there are a few things:

- IBM/Telus typically have better/bigger lawyers in case things went south
- IBM/Telus also typically can prepare 24/7 customer support
- Sub-contractor consulting companies don’t have “Sales” people to position themselves to win big projects.
- Sub-contractor typically offers Tier-2 support and may range between 9-5PM working hours or slightly a little bit more.

My point is that you need to know how these type of projects being structured.

I’ve worked for both hi-tech companies and consulting company before and the experiences have given me a broader perspective why certain project may seem to cost absurdly high.
Ted

This argument has a few flaw albeit I won’t argue too much with technicalities.

First of all, companies like Google and Facebook can afford to pay engineers $90k – $120k annually. They can also afford to hire the best engineers out there. For a project like City of Vancouver, they may not be able to do so.

Second, a project like this typically requires support. Who’s going to support your LAMP stack? This is all about shifting responsibility to the guy who sits on the very end of the table.

If you go with LAMP, nobody would want to support it. Not the first-tier consulting companies, not the second-tier (sub-contract) consulting companies.

If you go with Microsoft/Oracle/IBM, you can buy licenses from them and cover your back if something happens. You can always tell City of Vancouver: “we’re working on this issue with the vendor”.

Obviously it is a coin-toss whether troubles would happen or not.

The other thing to remember is the roadmap. Whether hard-core software developers like it or not to hear some of these “business” jargons, perception matters. If Microsoft says they’re going to support a certain version of IIS for 5 years, calculating budget becomes a little bit less variably.

When you look at LAMP, there’s no roadmap. Calculating budget for a few years down the road becomes a little bit challenging.
Ted

You’ve obviously haven’t been in the IT industry eh? The number of “mess” out there may surprised you. Even in the company like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM. “Mess” here depends on your perspective: usability, disparate systems, internal codebase, etc.

That’s not saying that I agree/disagree with the cost issue.

Speaking of $3M, correct me if I’m wrong, that’s $3M over 3 years.

We need the breakdown before we burn people

- Hardware?
- Labour?
- Support?
Graham

Vince, I just checked Coquitlam website due to the cost difference you mentioned.

It looks like Coquitlam doesn’t offer an online system for dog license (just a poor form) vs an actual online system that City of Vancouver offers from its new website (actual account#, etc etc).
MMOC

As a Web Developer that is extremely way over board are we serious people… we are talking 3 Million here this is not 300K its 3 Million. There is no ROI to be made here is a portal nothing more or less. It has an antiquated payment portal and the list goes on … have we seen the parking ticket payment layout … seriously … the city should be held accountable for misappropriations of funds for a project of this nature… the project manager who ever it may be should be let go… The sad part this is Canada and when do we ever get excited over anything like this we just let it slide through as okay what can we do? Sad part i guess nothing or is there?
Raza Mirza

I understand my comments sounded biased towards open-source, but that wasn’t the intention.
In fact, I agree with you. Unless you have a full team of internal developerssupport engineers, open source is not the way to go. You don’t want to build a system on top of moving pieces with no clear plan where they will go next. This stability is the major reason your Microsofts, Oracles, and IBMs are still relevant today. So the choice of technology isn’t the issue.
Raza Mirza

Yes, if the city had gone with a top tier development company your break down is valid. But the city didn’t go that route. Plus I’m sure if $3m included the cost of long term support someone from city hall would have jump in by to justify the cost.

I’m sure other companies were involved, but one of them was Open Road:
http://www.openroad.ca/2012/08/17/city-of-vancouver-website-redesign-ia-content-strategy-at-city-hall/

Now it’s up to you to decide which tier you want to put them in.
Ldbegley

Why are we speculating, why is every statement in this article prefaced with assumption? Why hasn’t anyone flat out asked why it cost $3 million and demanded a full accounting?

Why the City of Vancouver website Cost $3 million

Requirements gathering

Planning & Usability

Design

Development

ROI

Was $3 million too much to pay for a web platform as complex as one required for a city of this size?

Could it have been done for less?

Was it worth the money?

Around Town More Vancouver Happenings

Friends of Vancity Buzz

Contributors

Contact Us

Why the City of Vancouver website Cost $3 million

Requirements gathering

Planning & Usability

Design

Development

ROI

Was $3 million too much to pay for a web platform as complex as one required for a city of this size?

Could it have been done for less?

Was it worth the money?

You May Also Like

Around Town More Vancouver Happenings

Friends of Vancity Buzz

Contributors

Contact Us