>After spending billions
>
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8397854.stm
>
>Why do I feel a small team could have delivered 90% of what they wanted at 10% or less of the cost. (And no I'm not saying it could have been done in Fox :-) )

I certainly agree that the scale of the over-run is preposterous and that the aims were probably over-ambitious.
But the cost of software development is probably only a small part of the total (can't find coroboration of this tho :-{). It also involved the whole hardware infrastructure, digitizing billions of medical records etc. That's not something you can do with 'a small team'

Best,
Viv