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Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

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Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#251

Post by kumarvvr »

rich_sasha wrote: post #3

My main question is: who hires Accenture for this kind of job, for no less than $32m??? They would be my last point of call, literally after my mum, and maybe even after my dog. At least he's cheap.

Mostly its a "no one gets fired for choosing IBM" thing.

Imagine the position of the CTO if the project went to a smaller sized, not so well known, consulting firm, and it failed. The CTO would be responsible for the failure.

But with firms like Accenture, it would be the firms fault as they "are the experts".

Sadly, IT knowledge is low enough in the general population that this shifting of blame will be the norm for the foreseeable future.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#252

Post by robswc »

turns0ut wrote: post #181
pembrook wrote: post #44

It’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…

And then you get posts from experts like you convinced there’s really some big picture goal to technology; that you’re not just optimizing for employment yourself.

You can certainly take pride in your work and build a good product all the same though. Big consulting companies usually deliver bad products because their structure makes it almost impossible to do anything else.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#253

Post by abigail95 »

treis wrote: post #91
c3534l wrote: post #36

I don't understand why anyone would think $32 million is a reasonable price point for a car rental site to begin with.

It's not just a website. They were merging at least three different enterprise level backend plus deploying the front end to thousands of locations. That's a gigantic effort.

I could do it for $5M, and it would work.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#254

Post by robswc »

airstrike wrote: post #51
rich_sasha wrote: post #3

My main question is: who hires Accenture for this kind of job, for no less than $32m??? They would be my last point of call, literally after my mum, and maybe even after my dog. At least he's cheap.

I often wonder how much it would cost to literally hire the best freelancers in the market today to build their alternative to this monstrosity

I really think the skills and "product" would be better. The managing and structure could be a nightmare though.

Then again, Accenture shows they can be a nightmare too.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#255

Post by thoughtpalette »

danny_taco wrote: post #128

I was at Accenture Digital, now rebranded as Accenture Song, when Hertz was a client in our office. Most projects had the same issues. I was hired as a developer to work on the front-end of a very ambitious app for one of the biggest oil companies in the world. One year later we delivered a crappy single page app, a relational database and some data pipelines, and in exchange we billed them no less than 20 million. I…

I was also on the Hertz project and the oil project at Accenture. Hiya danny_taco!

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#256

Post by mleo »

malux85 wrote: post #84
Nextgrid wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you read the title? When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name, I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal presentation slide I was not supposed to see)

There is also rack rate and discount rate. The rack rate can be insanely high. The discount will take into account several things. 1. How much does the consulting company wants to work with a client? If it is seen as a high profile client or has long term potential then the discount rate will be better. 2. How long will the assignment be? The longer the assignment, the more billable hours for a person and the lesser the company is still paying a full time person when they are not billable. 3. How much is the sales person trying to make a sale? It's the delivery teams' issue to deal with not enough margin to deliver under budget =or just change order the heck out of the client after the sale.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#257

Post by SoftTalker »

devmor wrote: post #34
1123581321 wrote: post #6

A 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.

I had a similar experience but with a contract 10x that amount. It was baffling.

That's business. Shifting sands to one degree or another. Sometimes markets change, sometimes strategy changes. If a project no longer makes sense, you drop it, sunk costs are sunk costs.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#259

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

SMAAART wrote: post #248
pembrook wrote: post #44

It’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…

> 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 staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first assignment. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because the people who worked on the original case study are…

Well, first they usually roll out a 40 year old "partner" (and that's the end-goal here- you want to be made "partner") who will show some diagrams in a PowerPoint or even diagram some stuff on a whiteboard, and never seen again. When shit hits the fan, they bust out a "SWAT Team" which is a few people with actual experience in an attempt to unfuck whatever those 24-year-olds screwed up.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#260

Post by civilized »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #172

As far as I can tell, this sort of over-promise, under-deliver, bill-huge thing is pretty normal for these massive consulting companies. Their big name experts come in, tell you how you're doing it all wrong and they have the best solution around for only $X million and they can deliver in 12 months. Management nods, gives the greenlight, tells you to cooperate fully with them. Their layers of consultants then tie up…

Consultant nonsense is what convinced me the Pointy-Haired Boss popularized in Dilbert is the true IRL face of management.
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