Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz

Accenture depends heavily on its army of outsourced smaller firms with junior remote staff. No surprise here.

You use Accenture to supplement your team. You never give them the whole project, especially IT and design projects.

80% of the blame lies with Hertz management. It's professional negligence and mismanagement.

Most likely, they were probably advised against the decision. Even if they weren't, there likely were plenty of warning signs along the way.

People are talking about building in-house talent. I was part of the in-house talent at Hertz. We were executing the strategic initiatives (at some level we came up with them), and we were doing a damn fine job at it.

In early 2016, they fired us all. We were made to train up our replacements (at IBM in India) in order to receive severance packages. Later we found out that Accenture had picked up the initiative. And now the world knows the rest of the story.

All the points made here (ie warning signs, organic initiative) were passionately made at the time to Hertz brass. But someone, no doubt on a golf course somewhere, sold them the idea that they can save millions on paper. And, on paper, they were right: Shortly after firing us all, the CIO received a $7 million bonus. Unfortunately for everyone involved (except the CIO, of course), paper doesn't reflect reality.

They do. All the code they would have "Written" would have been done by offshoring teams in india or mexico or etc. These offshore locations only know specific technologies. A specific building in India, for example, may only know how to write WCF code that gets data from a SOAP call. Their Mexico building may genuinely only know how to write WPF applications.

To be clear, this isn't a knock against Mexican or Indian people. But the people working in these accenture buildings are literally writing code using windows notepad, in un-airconditioned rooms, and fired if they don't deliver on time.

They then, obviously, write buggy code, which Accenture then offers to fix to the client for an additional fee. They used to have onshore American developers responsible for being the white/professional face to the client, but they've since dropped that as well, and now only hire on a management level for that role.

The crazy thing is IBM consulting is worse. I've been forced to work with IBM .Net Consultants who didn't know what visual studio was. Not how to use it, but literally didn't know what it was. And when shown what it was, couldn't figure out how to start the installation process. Again, not install the whole thing, couldn't figure out how to double click Setup.exe.

The very best though, was a small consulting company that was competing against my Accenture project back at the time. He was, of course, also an Indian outsourcing company. But he came with the additional twist that everyone he hired as a developer was a woman from India, and was only on-site in the USA on temporary work permit. He was the only man. So if they didn't do exactly what he said, he would kick them out of the country, and send them back to India. No potential for gross abuse there.

There are great offhsoring companies, but they don't work for offshoring rates. I now firmly believe that if your company is seriously looking at offshoring their technology for cost savings, it is not a competent technology company already.

I actually did the exact opposite but I hedged my bets. Accenture was awarded a 40 million dollar by Marriott. At the time I was a fairly powerful executive at Marriott that was in charge of the web middle-ware and infrastructure technologies. They delivered a plan and it was pretty much we are going to build this whole thing on JSP, Struts and WebSphere. I wrote a manifesto to the board about how doing so was setting us back years in development as the world has moved on from these technologies to front end, and back end web technologies.

So I remember they had a program manager from the middle east and he tried every underhanded trick to undermine my credibility. So I buffered myself by hiring a small crew of IBM's Solutions Services and borrowing the top UI designer from Apple on a consultancy basis, these guys are not global services but rather very high end DE's from IBM such as Roland Barcia and Mathew Perrins. Anyways we built a point by point rebuttal against all of Accentures proposals and how we could not achieve our goals using old page-post model that they where proposing.

So anyways, Accenture is arguing that JS based front end technologies are not mature, rest is not proven, etc, etc.

Anyways so we are in the board, meeting with the CTO, CIO and CFO from Marriott as well as my direct line president who is totally on my side. And this program manager starts going on and on about this (it was basically them covering for the fact that they had nothing but sub par Java talent in their org.). So while he is going on and on, I start walking around the table and start dropping packets in front of all my execs. Then I start dropping them in front of the Accenture top brass finally the program manager. The packet contained a Gartner research article from Accenture's CTO about how enterprises that fail to adopt disconnected JS and mobile UI's based on components communicating with legacy enterprise systems via rest ran the risk of becoming outdated and increase technical debt.

Anyway, program manager lost his shit, and came over the table at me. Accenture was escorted out the door, I was asked to provide a budget and a resource plan for implementing it in house. I went to my program manager, and two of my contracting outfits about scaling resource and we came up with a conservative figure of around 7 million, and a 1 year time-frame. We finished in 8 months, at 4.5 million total spend.

TLDR - I saved Marriott 35 million dollars by getting rid of Accenture, did it in house, was attacked by an Accenture personnel and was asked to consider the interim CTO position due to the overwhelming success. I resigned 2 months after the project was finished and went back to remote development, I have never considered a executive or CTO position again after that and other experiences as a CTO with other orgs.