GW preamble up, New CEO incoming, Annual report included now

[Agincourt]

-Website cost £4 million! (JJ, Stu you guys have an idea working in that field, surely can't have cost that much right?)

Well if they paid £4 mil for that, they got done. Haha. It's certainly possible a very large website for an international brand like say JLR might cost something like that but seems pretty high. I've worked on website projects ranging from several hundred pounds right up to tens of thousands but I know of projects that have been in the hundreds of thousands.

4 mil seems a bit ridiculous to me though.

What something costs depends on how you (want to) calculate the cost. For example, they may have paid PoisonSpyderWebBuilders 500k for a defined job. They may have allocated they had 20 people in house working on and planning it for a year. Maybe their average salary is 25k, so that's another 500k salary - but those people cost the same again in 'employment costs', they have desks, computers, phones, IT support, HR, managers, etc... so that's another 500k. If it's the CEOs pet project then add another 250k. Then there is training of staff around the world. 2500 (?) staff x 2 hours each 5000 hours at a cost of (hmmm, finge rin the air) £100 per hour = 500k. Cost is not just today, factor in investment costs for next 5 years, then we will build in 5 years maintenance of the system, constant changes of stock, etc. another 100k per year for PoisonSpyder 500k. Plus big marketing push worldwide 500k maintain for another 5 years at 100k per year = 500k. Thats 3.75M already...

So now an 'expensive' 500k job has become 3.75M... Undoubtedly a lot of double accounting going on in this simple example, but that's what can happen and then it's easy to generate big numbers if you want/need to.

I remember a local council sacking 20 school crossing people to save 600k per annum... hmmm... 20 people work 10 hours a week for 39 weeks a year, 7,800 hours. That's pay of about £77 an hour...! Maybe not me thinks. Accounting hocum...