Contract Viability Assessment
Public Administration
Context
A public administration had invested several years and significant budget into a large-scale technology modernization project with a major consulting firm. Despite multiple remediation efforts, including an independent audit by another large consultancy, the project continued to deliver poor quality outcomes. Leadership faced a decision: continue investing in remediation or terminate the contract and restart. Given the amounts already committed, no one was willing to make the call without certainty about the technical situation.
Engagement
We conducted a comprehensive assessment over several weeks, reviewing all previous audit reports, examining the delivered codebase in detail, and interviewing both client and vendor technical staff. To establish concrete comparisons, we developed proof-of-concept implementations of representative features using alternative approaches. This allowed us to directly measure the efficiency and quality gap between what had been delivered and what was technically feasible.
Findings
Our analysis documented that the delivered solution had created deep vendor lock-in through architectural decisions that made the system dependent on proprietary components and specialized knowledge held only by the vendor. Code quality analysis revealed systematic issues that previous audits had identified but had not been addressed. The proof-of-concept work established that representative features had cost approximately 50 times what equivalent implementations should have required. We documented that remediation costs would exceed the cost of terminating the contract and restarting with properly scoped requirements and a vendor with demonstrated domain expertise.
Outcome
Leadership was able to make an informed decision based on quantified technical and economic evidence. The contract was terminated, and a replacement vendor with specific domain expertise was engaged. The organization successfully delivered the modernization objectives under the new arrangement.