Previous website total omitted 3 vendors, staff time

Bill Johnson, chief financial officer at WCC. | Credit: Voice File Photo

By Lilly Kujawski
Editor

A previously reported cost of contracts for the new WCC website has turned out to be incomplete. Information provided by a college spokesman failed to include three contractors, whose work add another $175,000 to the vendor total. The total cost of outside vendors for the project was $540,000.

The cost and details about contractors was previously provided to the Voice in September 2019 by the former associate vice president of marketing and communications Brendan Prebo. Prebo said the cost was $365,000. Prebo’s employment at WCC concluded on Jan. 3.

After the Voice used Prebo’s figure for the second time, Jason Withrow, a web design and development faculty member at the college, challenged the cost.

The number provided by Prebo was apparently limited to external contractors and—in addition to omitting three of the contractors—failed to include hours worked by WCC staff.

The new information about cost and outside vendors was provided by Larry Barkoff, general counsel for the college.

In addition to external contractors, WCC employees also devoted significant time and effort to the project. Chief Financial Officer Bill Johnson was the acting chief information officer of the Information Technology Services department at the time and led early stages of the website project.

In an interview last week, Johnson said the hours that WCC employees from ITS and Web Services spent working on the website project were never tracked.

“Everyone had multiple projects that they were working on, so it would be… impossible for me to guesstimate hours,” Johnson said.

Former WCC employee Francisco Roque worked as the lead system engineer in the ITS department. He estimated that between December and March of 2019 he spent about 4-8 hours per week working on the website project. Roque had limited involvement in the project and mostly helped with server architecture.

Roque said there was a small team of about three or four people who were largely dedicated to the website, though he wasn’t sure if they were all WCC employees or if some were contractors. Roque said he observed the work they put into the project and it was substantial.

“Man, those people worked very hard. I mean, I would go in on the weekends sometimes, just to, like, pick up something I left in the office and I’d see them in the office,” Roque said. “They would work 70-hour weeks… regularly.”

Considering the $540,000 spent on contracts and his best estimate of the time ITS and Web Services employees put into the project, Withrow, who has industry experience in web development, guessed that the true cost of the website project was likely $1 million or more.

The Voice requested a copy of the budget for the project from Johnson, but he said one does not exist.

“We didn’t really establish a formal budget for it; it was something that we grew into,” Johnson said.

It’s fairly unusual not to have a formal budget for a website project of this caliber, Withrow said.

“The value of a budget is it helps you to control the scope of what the project is,” Withrow said. “Without a budget, things just spiral.”

A budget also helps to put a cap to the investment of time, work and money on the project, Withrow said.

“If there’s not a real sense of cost control, there’s nothing really containing the project,” Withrow said. “It can just keep going and going and going.

“Ask anyone: ‘does it seem right to have spent over half a million dollars on a project that didn’t have a budget?’” Withrow said.

Withrow said that $540,000 for the outside contracts alone seems like more money than a website project like this should have cost.

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