The outsourcing is to be blamed on the project model.
I could staff up a small team and build this thing on a fraction of the budget, as proven by the “competing” initiative.
Many of us could!
You could even outsource some of the work to individual devs around the world.
What you can’t do is accomplish that under the weight of a PMO spawned project with a billion in budget.
* That team is still necessary for future changes and maintenance, including security and transitions.
* The public sector has many institutions* where such a team should have tenure (and other work to fill the non-public works projects time).
Offhand, These institutions include the temples of information worship (libraries), information provisioning (higher education of all sorts; elementary and lower are for converting feral humans to educated people), and any civil engineers (civilian or military at any level).
This wouldn’t as much rub me the wrong way had this been an effort of actual employees and staff at some govt agency where this were a longer term (indefinite?) initiative. At least then it turns in to:
- mostly a zero sum game with my tax money
- opens up for other, future, opportunities and lessons learned
Hiring services from consultancies and third parties that after project end will “hand-off” to maintenance and operations to... another third party. I mean. Come on!