Bring in the consultants

Quick question - what is the difference between a project done internally by a company and one done by consultants given the same set of requirements?

The one done internally would be done as simple as possible for as little cost as possible.

The one done by consultants would end up being as expensive as possible and bring in as many additional consultants to do the work.

Take for example a real project - one to develop a portal page. Logic says that you could create a simple static web page and redirect people to their destinations. Just publish a standardized look and feel for all the different applications within the organization.

The consultants come in and want to change the portal page into a gatekeeper application where all the pages are retrieved by the gatekeeper application, parsed and updated, and then streamed down to the users. Not only has this introduced latency and a single point of failure, but it has also increased complexity since each application team has a bit of a different design and some things, like popup windows, aren't handled very well.

Still it seems easier to just publish a set of stylesheets and a design guide and let the different application teams work towards a single standard than parsing the pages and modifying them on the fly.

Consultants seem to be more concerned with spending lots of cash instead of producing a good product.