
Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz - tomduncalf
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsuit/
======
stevetursi
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.

~~~
mk89
Profit, short term thinking, incompetence. This triplet is so common that
seems to be part of a major study that lots of execs have properly mastered.

Is there anywhere some study/statistics that shows the impact of those 3
elements together? Because I am quite sure it's extremely common, or I just
stumble upon such cases really frequently....

~~~
raverbashing
Why should they worry about it? CxO are rarely held accountable for their
missteps by the board.

Maybe this time it didn't go out unnoticed because someone actually tried to
use their website and got pissed off it didn't work

~~~
stevetursi
He was eventually pushed out, last summer. But it's not like he had to give
his $7 million back.

~~~
rahulsom
What's that like? 3 managers and 12 developers/analysts?

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iammiles
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 on AWS.

All the firms we spoke to were onboard with this and continued on with their
proposals except Accenture. One of their lead devs was extremely combative and
trying to tell us that going with Angular was a much better idea / React is a
failure. On top of this, they kept pitching that they were going to rewrite
all the backend services, which was not part of the RFP or even brought up as
something wanted.

It really felt like they already had a generic turnkey product in place and
wanted to sell us that instead.

~~~
ep103
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.

~~~
equasar
>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 pictures:

[https://foursquare.com/v/accenture/4cc081f11c6c6dcb00d8755e](https://foursquare.com/v/accenture/4cc081f11c6c6dcb00d8755e)

Your entire comment is just a bunch of lies, not sure what you are trying to
accomplish.

I'm not defending Accenture over this lawsuit, but it seems that you bring so
much hate with that comment.

~~~
ep103
I left Accenture upset by a number of the practices that I saw, even though I
largely worked with very good people.

I also was definitely overreacting when I wrote the above, as I am currently
dealing with an issue with an overseas contracting team at the moment, and
used the above comment to blow off some steam. I apologize for the vitriol.

Monte Ray is the new facility they were building when I left. I'm happy to
hear it might actually be a good building.

When I left, it was explained to me that on Monday mornings, many of the
Mexican development team were driven via school bus over the border to work in
the SouthWest, and that as a result, American hiring was going to be at least
temporarily frozen, and that they would be responsible solely for WPF
applications.

The line about un-airconditioned buildings and notepad is how the office we
were working with in India was described to me by the manager in charge of
that team on my project.

I thought, given the similarities of those two stories, that conditions would
therefore be similar to the Mexican office.

I apologize for the mistake, and am happy to hear that I am wrong. Apologies
for the incorrect comment.

~~~
rahulsom
> The line about un-airconditioned buildings and notepad is how the office we
> were working with in India was described to me by the manager in charge of
> that team on my project.

I worked in Bangalore in 2005, (the city with the best weather among cities
with tech offshoring offices). Even Bangalore had airconditioned offices.

Second-hand bullshit is still bullshit.

------
manishsharan
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 executives , managers and architects and developers. They should
have then supplemented this taskforce with contractors or even outsourcing
companies.

Let Accenture own the whole initiative from soup-to-nuts was dumb. Fire that
CIO!

~~~
dentemple
Exactly.

All they wanted was a mobile-first website.

Did that _really_ require a $32 million investment? An in-house team could've
handled that for less, with more trust involved.

Focus on hiring good people!

~~~
x0x0
$32m isn't crazy for a redesign of a large ecommerce site. Consider the needs
right out of the box:

* multi-language and accessible

* desktop, tablet, mobile -- doing this well requires pretty good design chops and a lot of testing

* handles money and credit cards, so requires PCI compliance -- there's little chance they're going to move to something like Stripe at their scale

* probably connects to a godawful homegrown inventory system

* very high uptime requirements

* integration with their analytics chain, to provide highly complex ad reporting and conversion optimization flows

* an administration UI that functions both at the global level and at the store level with complex permissions and reporting given the various management chains involved

Considering even a mid-tier dev costs order $200k fully loaded, a small front-
end scrum team of 5 front end eng, a designer, and a PM runs you $1.4/year; a
backend team of 10 also with a PM runs $2.5m. That's $8m over 2 years for a
pretty small team and not super-expensive talent. I'd initially spec the Hertz
site as over $20m to build. And that cost could _easily_ rise.

~~~
Bamafan
All that.

I've told people who scoff at $32 million "for a website" that $32 million
might actually be low, depending on requirements.

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smileysteve
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.

~~~
kls
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.

~~~
macspoofing
So what backend did you standardize on?

~~~
kls
Java rest services. At the time we had heavy investment in Java talent and
there was no reason to retrain a large group of in-house developers when they
already had to learn a host of new technologies to adapt to the changing
landscape of the web UI and mobile.

------
pcurve
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.

------
kfk
Well the reality is that this setup is even more expensive than internal
talent! I have hired and manage a team of 5 people for data analytics work.
Our IT keeps pushing us to user offshore resources at hourly rates instead
(Capgemini, same crap as Accenture) that would end up costing the company 2-3
times more then our internal analysts. On top of that these people are not
well trained, lack motivation, do mistakes everywhere and somehow always put
the fault of all problems back to you, because you did not test well or not
write all requirements etc.. I am saving the compay hundreds of thousands, I
could save millions but I just can’t fight this all political mess alone. The
interesting point is that my analysts do work in an offshore location, but we
pay them well and we spend a lot of time training them on sound technologies,
not the crap consulting comes up with. Also we kid ourselves thinking projects
end, in real life projects become routine work so hiring people on project
basis does not work, you pay them a temp work premium but it’s not temp work.

~~~
greggyb
Hire me. I consult in exactly this field. I will charge an exorbitant rate
(you know, to show I'm qualified) and come tell your leadership that they're
wrong.

This is a service I'm very happy to offer!

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

~~~
emiliobumachar
Brace for impact.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-24/obamacare...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-24/obamacare-
website-costs-exceed-2-billion-study-finds)

"The federal government’s Obamacare enrollment system has cost about $2.1
billion so far, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis of contracts
related to the project."

~~~
nitwit005
That had senators intentionally shoving bits of the system into their state.
They wanted more money flowing to the state, so larger numbers were a plus
from their perspective.

They got to blame any failure on Obama, so why not I guess.

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willhallonline
This suggests so much that it is so important to choose the _right_ partners
for the job. Accenture has certainly made mistakes and I would presume that
Hertz has a long contract to use Accenture as an outsourcing provider, so it
may well not have been an option to use anyone else. But, what a farce.

Everyone has the ability to make mistakes, but you probably wouldn't hire a
plumber to change your electrics. And I would think that the chances are that
the actual work is being completed by people who have little understanding of
the job they are supposed to be completing (and it appears maybe even the
tools they are supposed to be using).

The extra frustrating things are that I am sure this will be used by people to
suggest at why software projects fail; whereas, it is probably more
symptomatic of a string of errors over project planning and understanding.

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

------
Kipters
I used to work for an "orange" company close to Accenture, I left for these
exact reasons

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jrochkind1
> And then in what may be the ultimate management consulting logic, Accenture
> apparently told Hertz that to speed up the production of the website's
> content management system, it wanted to use something called "RAPID" – and
> told Hertz it would have to buy licenses for it to do so. Hertz bought the
> licenses, however, it turned out that Accenture didn't actually know how to
> use the technology and the quick-fix took longer than it would have done
> without it.

Anyone know about what they're talking about?

------
pmarreck
Don’t hire a consulting firm to do development work because they will just
hire it out to a shitty firm in India and charge an exorbitant premium

------
unlimit
I don't get the headline. "Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it
Hertz".

Are they trying to use Hertz instead of hurt??

~~~
knolax
Hertz is a car rental company in North America that hired Accenture to
redesign their website. The redesign was bad so Hertz broke off the contract
and sued Accenture.

~~~
WheelsAtLarge
Yup. Headline writers just love the puns.

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mrosett
An amazing bit of context here is that Accenture were the ones who got hired
to replace the incompetent contractors who built the disastrous first version
of healthcare.gov. Apparently large-scale web development projects have a hard
time getting good talent.

~~~
dentemple
>Apparently large-scale web development projects have a hard time getting good
talent.

... for acceptable wages. That's the kicker.

Good talent doesn't sign up for large-scale web projects at $20k/year.

------
efarid
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!

~~~
rchaud
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.

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WallyMcClure
I’m surprised by reading this. I worked at The Coca-Cola Company in downtown
Atlanta for a few years. What I watched TCCC do to outsiders just boggled my
mind. It seems that everyone is jumping on Accenture. I have no love for
Accenture. I’ve heard lots of bad about them from before this story. Because I
worked at TCCC. I can only imagine the hell that Hertz put them through. This
was a five year project trying to get jammed into 15 months. I got the feeling
from reading the complaint that the hertz people knew what was being asked for
and they didn’t share that with anyone from Accenture. There are rules for
successful software development. Hertz violated plenty of them and got what
they deserved.

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chaddattilio
I'm guessing the comps were shit.

