
Hertz Wanted a Cool Website: It Ended Up with a $32M Legal Nightmare - jpatokal
https://skift.com/2019/04/26/hertz-wanted-a-cool-website-it-ended-up-with-a-32-million-legal-nightmare/
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duxup
This is of course one side of the story so who knows.

>“Hertz raised this issue directly with Accenture. In response, Accenture’s
project leader replied that ‘we felt that creating a generic base and
extending Hertz from that would have been less useful and less productive,’”
the lawsuit states.

If true it seems like there maybe should have been some communication as far
as what was going on before later on you tell the customer "oh by the way we
thought your was a bad idea so we did something other than what you're paying
us for".

>The firm even convinced Hertz to buy a license for RAPID, a program it said
would help streamline the development of a new content management system.
However, once Hertz bought the license, the firm admitted it did not know how
to use RAPID.

That's another one where you have to wonder where communication went terribly
wrong.

Anyway if you're a big company like Hertz, this is why you have an in house
team and staff so you can keep this stuff under control and not blow 32 mil
and go to court with squat. Once you farm it out, you ultimately do not know
what is going on.

Even just a small-ish in house staff with visibility should be able to see
"hey they're not using this RAPID thing at all" or "this won't work for other
sites" long before you blow through deadlines and walk away with squat and -32
million.

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grizzles
I'd wager Accenture is at fault but what a dinosaur Hertz is, outsourcing this
and failing. They should outsource the CEO & board too, clearly they are too
incompetent to manage a modern company and brand.

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duxup
It would be really interesting to know how this played out, but yeah Hertz
seemed to outsource ... to oblivion here. Apparently to the point they stuck
with Accenture way to long and kept paying out the money for squat.

You'd think even a small in house development team who would team up with the
Accenture team would pretty quickly spot some of these kinds of problems...
but apparently they didn't do that? That's some serous mismanagement.

~~~
luckylion
Or their development team was made up from people they got from Accenture.
It's not uncommon for large consultant agencies to place staff at clients
where they've worked on projects before. Those people, of course, have divided
loyalties.

