That's One Expensive, Knocked-Down Fence

With a tip of the hat to Will Collier, here’s one educated guess about how the New York Times managed to spend $40 million putting up its paywall:

I can actually see how this happens. Large organizations spending millions and taking years to do something a small team could whip up (and probably do a better job of) in a few months.

Different team sizes are required for different tasks. Some companies get this and put small teams together and have flexible processes that can scale to project size. Other companies can only do things one way, and that’s where you end up with insanity such as this.

You end up with layers and layers of process controlling huge unwieldy teams. You spend months just drafting the process by which you’ll operate under, and then it needs to be reviewed and this is before development even begins! You end up with 5 layers of management, each providing no real value to anything… but adding lots of time and cost.

You’ll need to gather metrics of course, so you need to figure out what metrics you need, and how you will analyse them, and how they will feed back into the dev process. And of course you’ll need someone to actually facilitate all this with some kind of metric crunching tool (which has to be bought and admined as well).

And from the comments, “I actually use to work for the Times as a tech and all I can say is, man you nailed it.”

UPDATE: Speaking of Will… ouch.