1.5 million, close to 2 years and a "small band" of programmers to deliver a specialized product working on-site with the end users. Call me naive, but this sounds completely reasonable to me.
You know, the case where you hire a team of contractors to build something, and then that team totally screws up, goes years past the deadline, and charges you enormous amounts of money. Meanwhile, there are ready-to-ship products out there that can be bought for a yearly fee, which carry less risk but higher costs.
Agreed. I'd go further and say I would expect many here have successfully completed similarly complex projects single-handedly with a lot less time and money.
As I grow older, I'm increasingly starting to believe that many of the advancements in sophistication of software are actually somehow making it much less possible to successfully implement relatively complex solutions on budget - I am making this comparison to the relatively short era where platforms like PowerBuilder/Delphi/MSAccess were popular. If you mention on of those products now for literally anything, you'll be met with howls of laughter, but for the life of me I don't understand. Meanwhile, spending $2 million on a project that is laughably short on functionality and seems to take weeks to make the smallest of changes is considered (with grave seriousness and 100% infallible confidence) to be perfectly proper.
I think the keys are that they have a limited set of requirements, they're close to the users, they have low/reasonable expectations, and are willing to accept that the system will need updating & improving in the future. Sounds like a perfect fit for one of the agile methodologies.
We are currently on budget and on track with our build. Incidentally when it comes to attempt to build an open source package to replace a commercial product this is not entirely correct.
Before we began our build we did a complete analysis of the functionality we required in a SIS using our current commercial SIS as the basis. We found that because the commercial SIS was developed for multiple jurisdictions the actual screens and fields we required for British Columbia schools was only 27% of the complete commercial SIS. So we are not crafting a replacement for the commercial but a rather small subset of the requirements targeted specifically for our environment.
