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Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz

#41

Post by rdl »

stevetursi wrote: post #15

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…

I wonder what a stock portfolio based on shorting companies who sign contracts with IBM India, Accenture, Wipro, etc. for outsourcing would look like in terms of performance. Probably too much of a leading indicator to be truly useful.

Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz

#42

Post by rchaud »

efarid wrote: post #37

On the bright side, this is a hard lesson to those who seek the hype of digital transformation without actually knowing it's about people mindset and skill before software and fancy technology!

The only times I even hear the words "digital transformation" is in management-focused publications like HBR or in marketing literature from shops that CRM implementations. Even though HBR articles are sometimes written by technical people, the words themselves tend to be buzzword soup.

I feel like they're speaking to a non-technical upper management audience. Surely someone familiar with managing IT projects would see those words and run for the hills.

Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz

#43

Post by 1PlayerOne »

rdl wrote: post #41
stevetursi wrote: post #15

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…

I wonder what a stock portfolio based on shorting companies who sign contracts with IBM India, Accenture, Wipro, etc. for outsourcing would look like in terms of performance. Probably too much of a leading indicator to be truly useful.

Someone has probably made a handsome profit of this idea

Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz

#44

Post by jitbit »

kls wrote: post #19
smileysteve wrote: post #14

This is why you outsource; the executive that decided to use Accenture is most likely safe despite the failure. Nobody got fired for hiring Microsoft or IBM for a project. The person who gets fired is the executive that says "we can do this in house" and comes up at 90-110% but stepped on the wrong board member's toes.

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 settin…

Thank you. Great story.

Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz

#45

Post by acndev »

iammiles wrote: post #12

I work for a fairly large corporation that was looking at Accenture (among other firms) to help augment our team on a complete revamp of a current web product. By the time we were taking RFP's and listening to pitches, we as a company had already chosen the stack and architecture of how we wanted this new product to be. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary: Typescript with React / Redux with various services hosted…

As someone who worked as a dev for Accenture I can tell you you're absolutely correct. When I was there we basically sold solutions based on what products we already had. I worked on some of our platforms that went on to be sold to various clients.

We were largely a VS/Java shop when I was there then we started to invest more in Angular, so that's probably why they fought so hard to convince you.

Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz

#46

Post by rustyf »

kls wrote: post #19
smileysteve wrote: post #14

This is why you outsource; the executive that decided to use Accenture is most likely safe despite the failure. Nobody got fired for hiring Microsoft or IBM for a project. The person who gets fired is the executive that says "we can do this in house" and comes up at 90-110% but stepped on the wrong board member's toes.

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 settin…

Great story, thanks

Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz

#48

Post by asdffdsa »

equasar wrote: post #25
ep103 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. I just stopped reading after this. You are full of yourself. I had the chance to work with a team in Accenture Mexico, and they offices are nothing but great, just look at the pictur…

Fine, have it your way. They work in great offices with healthy living conditions. The code they deliver is still buggy and deficient

Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz

#49

Post by kinich »

manishsharan wrote: post #5

This is why you need to develop in-house talent for execution of strategic initiatives. The consultants are very useful for helping formulate strategy and they are worth the money. But implementation has to be done by the organization itself as the knowledge and network required to implement an initiative is deeply organic. Once the management had settled on a strategic direction, they should have hired key executive…

> This is why you need to develop in-house talent for execution of strategic initiatives.

Sorry but I've seen "in-house" code and it's utter shit as well. I work as an outsourcing developer from a Consultancy agency, and all the management is done by the client.

So, even if the code is all "in-house" that's not enought to build quality code.

Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz

#50

Post by ilaksh »

supro wrote: post #27

I will be honest to admit, before I read this article, I didn't even know charging $32 million was possible for a website.

The thing is it's not just a website. Calling it that just made a better headline.

The website was a big part of it, but it was a lot more than that. The actual scope is roughly outlined in the article.

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