The 24x Scope Creep

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology just launched a new website. Budget: $4 million. Final cost: $96.5 million.

The technology worked fine. The problem was simpler: nobody properly understood how people actually use weather data. The previous site let users see the path a storm had taken and when it would arrive. Emergency services relied on this. That feature disappeared. The new radar color scale made storms look less severe than they were. Also not ideal.

And how did costs balloon 24x? The usual way. The $4 million figure was just the front-end redesign, with the real expenses buried in "backend infrastructure."

This is how many technology projects fail. Bad requirements and disregard for the end users don't add cost linearly. They compound. An extra month defining requirements properly costs far less than a year of scope extensions fixing a system that solves the wrong problem.