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Step 1 is not necessarily the worst idea, but it depends on you hiring competent people and managers (and it sounds like everything that followed was a result of this failure.)

The opposite end of the spectrum is CAHSR, which hired thousands of consultants with a staff of 180 and with very little to show for it https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-hi...

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Both did it themselves instead of public procurement/public tender.

At least the initial hiring of consultants was done publicly. (Subcontracting is usually not done via public tender, since it is assumed that the main contractor's bid includes the complexity and cost of whatever subcontractors they might need, and requiring public tender for everything would slow things down significantly.)

The problem was that actually following the advice to keep minimal in-house staff who could check the work was really stupid, no matter who would win such tenders.

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