They may have sold 100 contracts for something that looks vaguely similar, but there will be zero continuity between the team or the code. At most, you'll get the same managing partner overseeing the sales end, taking the credit for it. This concept of the "safety" of Deloitte, et al, is an illusion.
Cut the project budget to 10% but spend it 10 times. Make 10 smaller firms compete to make the thing and you will get what you need.
>They may have sold 100 contracts for something that looks vaguely similar, but there will be zero continuity between the team or the code.
There is such a thing as institutional knowledge, and if there is any benefit of a consulting company like Deloitte, it's that. You might not be getting the exact same developer that worked on the last project, but other than for small niche areas, there is going to be an entire bench of consultants that have nearly identical experience, and also have an entire library of past deliverables, training material, etc to quickly get up to speed.
And I can personally attest that these companies re-use the fuck out of any and all code, documentation etc they can. It's practically company motto that no matter how much a client insists they are a special snowflake that requires brand new, custom made designs, they certainly are not. No matter how much you think your pet project hasn't been done before, I can almost guarantee that it has, multiple times, and they are probably just going to take the deliverable from the last time they delivered it, Ctrl+F/replace the previous client's name with yours, and send it over to you. For better or worse, that's where the consistency comes from.
>Cut the project budget to 10% but spend it 10 times. Make 10 smaller firms compete to make the thing and you will get what you need.
Now this is a way to end up with an absolute clusterfuck of a project. You absolutely do not want to do this. Not only will you end up with 10 disorganized, disconnected projects that are each only 1/10th of the feature set you asked for, you're going to have to hire 10x the amount of people to oversee these 10 consulting companies (you'll probably have to hire an 11th consulting company just to PMO the other 10), and your entire project is going to turn into ruthless backstabbing as each of the 10 consulting companies try to sabotage each other or steal credit. It's not going to be some "friendly competition" where they all inspire each other to be better or some fantasy like that.
Since leaving B4, I've been in several situations where the client had the same mentality you do (well, with ~4-5 consulting companies rather than 10). It always, always was a colossal failure and in one situation directly led to the project buyer getting canned. In another situation, they ended up cancelling the contract with the various smaller companies and ended up just hiring a single larger consulting company to come in and clean up the mess, anyway.
Cut the project budget to 10% but spend it 10 times. Make 10 smaller firms compete to make the thing and you will get what you need.