I've never heard of a truly successful project by these large scale consulting firms. Even the so called success stories seem ... mediocre at best. Has anyone been part of such a project at a firm like that?
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Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
221–230 of 422 posts
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#222Accenture and other large SI firms are responsible for the majority of public and private sector complex and large software delivery projects. Many of them are resoundingly successful and deliver a great deal of value to businesses and their end users. Some do go wrong due to poor management and individual failures, but it would be unfair to tarnish entire industries based on these isolated incidents (full disclosure: I've worked for several consulting and SI firms in the past).
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was an intern in Accenture in 2010. My general impression was that my role was actually "budget filler". Saved up for a laptop and a driving course, so can't complain.
Billable Hours! This is why contracts should be outcome based and not based on hours. I don't care if the solution takes you ten days, or 10 minutes, it's the outcome that matters.
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Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#224It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms. The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be…
100% true and even if you offer a more higher caliber consultancy instead of these India outsourcing companies, the legacy corporations and their management will never want to admit that they know nothing about tech or their business.
Because the executives themselves have used iPhone or web browser they often think they know best what features the app needs, they claim that they don' need analytics or metrics from users and they don't want any advice from professionals. They just need bunch of "coders to do that coding thing or whatever".
On top of it they still want the software but they are not ready to pay the price for the software so they go for these con artist companies and in the end they have been milked 32M for a website that doesn't work.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
24 year olds? Since when are they sending the senior consultants out on engagements like this! I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services, really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.
did time contracting in medicaid, heard legends of $1100/hr java dev billing codes on big 5 contracts staffed by college hires (never saw first hand); also heard of big 5 contracts pass through 4 wrap layers of subsidiary (each raking 30% of whatever passed through) and end up staffed in india
They aren't called Beltway Bandits for nothing.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#226It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms. The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be…
I worked alongside one of these firms on a government contract. I was impressed by how perfectly optimized they were to extract money. The team's function was to report perfect KPIs at all costs. Managers spent virtually all their time bringing in more developers. Because "delivering a usable product" wasn't incentivized (specifically the 'usable' part, or what usability even meant), it was simply a race to generate…
And "managing expectations." If I heard that phrase once I heard it every day.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#227Quite often such "bad looking" business deals are actually well-planned money laundering or kickback schemes.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#228I once worked at a startup that came very close to securing a development contract with to build an early App Store like functionality for them. There was a major consulting group, like Accenture, bidding against us. In meetings with us TELCO would relay to us all the wonderful things this consulting company promised, which made absolutely no sense to us given the budget TELCO had given us. We figured the consulting…
I work for one of these large companies. I’ve witnessed a couple breakdowns pretty far up the org chart. I don’t mean crying on conference calls (that’s pretty normal) I mean like breakdowns resulting in hospitalization.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#229A client paid me $7,500 for a site in 2011, approved the final version, but never got around to giving me the hosting information. It never went live. The screenshots were fine portfolio pieces and I spent their money, but I’m still annoyed by that.
That’s not so bad. In my 20+ year career I’ve worked on a ton of projects which were internally killed, so essentially we poured our hearts and souls into products that never saw the light of day. I’m sure I’m not alone in this experience.
I figure most of these big companies (including the one I worked at) burn millions each year or efforts that never get shipped. I would say that a lot of times the projects weren’t necessarily intended to make a dent in anything, but just to keep teams busy and justify headcount.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
24 year olds? Since when are they sending the senior consultants out on engagements like this! I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services, really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.
Is there good money to be made though? If idiots are happy to pay more for shit than they do for quality work I'll happily deliver them shit.
They are not happy to pay for shit, but they are tricked into thinking that they can get same quality from India outsourcing as from actual professional devs/companies. Later they get angry and then they'll go to court. The order is following: 1) Sales people 2) Developer 3) Lawyers