Meanwhile at Accenture, I just delivered again another successful project with a real impact. When a very large organization across different regions were struggling to produce schedules for thousand workers with different skill sets, different union rules, night and day shifts, they came to see us. Now, everything is automated and the client saves months of work.
I sleep better at night knowing that I helped those workers now get access to their scheduled weeks in advance through a portal instead of having surprise night shifts thrown at them. Maybe I should make another app that track people online?
I've worked for Accenture (for way too long) and they can be characterised by a single statement that they make to the client when all is said and done and the client complains about the steaming pile of shite that was delivered:
"But in this signed contract here, there is no requirement that says our software should work".
Come on, every serious software engineer knows they are full of it.
My worst experiences always come from working with Americans and I don't come to the conclusion that all Americans are incompetent.
All we know about accenture around here (which is not the USA) is that they are good at covering their ass and the actual users of the stuff they produce are never happy.
Source: I used to work for a consultancy company. Might do so again, the work is more diverse and the pay and perks are much better than 'regular' companies.
It doesn't matter a whole lot if the contract was successful or the managers got their bonus for on-time delivery or the budget forecasts were correct, a crap product is a crap product.
Why not go straight to the source and sell your services for the full amount they billed as a consultant?
This is HN after all, get that money you deserve or use that idea for a new start-up to solve client problems at scale
I have seen or heard of lesser known multimillion dollar exits for small features you take for granted, but were learned from old enterprise companies that didn’t know what features would be valuable to develop e.g. fintech startup was just a developer at old banking company, invented ‘locking’ a credit card by knowing how their system is coded, got acquired by said banking company for the technology and never has to work again.
Make them pay for your talent if you can learn to sell and solve business problems for clients.
I was once in a bi-weekly sprint demo meeting (whole department). The team of consultants that were actually relocated to my country from India to keep a closer eye on them (iirc it was Infosys?) showed their work, and... it was a powerpoint presentation with a single slide with a single bullet point saying they think they found the source of a bug and will work on it next sprint.
I genuinely think accenture might be one of the most powerful companies in the world, just because of how many entire departments of so many major internaional corporations actually report to accenture management, not the parent company.
Anyone who has never worked at a large enterprise probably doesn't understand how time consuming and annoying getting a new legal signoff can be.
I've worked at both consulting companies and customers hiring and using consultants.
When consulting is successful, it's usually because the client knows when they want built.
When consulting is a failure, it's usually because the client is too incompetent to even clearly identify their own needs.
And if the client, who by definition possesses the most detailed knowledge of the requirements, doesn't know what they need then the entire enterprise is doomed to failure.
And the consultants get paid either way. I have done some real awful projects in my day, though the worst had to be a year-long product development effort as part of a JV. It became clear about 2 weeks in that the companies’ interest in the product were directly contradictory, and that the entire point of the JV was to get regulatory approval of a multi-billion dollar asset sale under the guise of a JV. The product development was just cover, and the client was all too happy to throw tens of millions of dollars at it to say “hey look, we tried to develop a product and it just didn’t work” since it was a fraction of a percent of the entire deal value.
I'm not sure why, but we have consultants explaining us how an if/else business workflow is in fact an "AI robot employee" that we even need to give a human name to, before we switch to normal/cheaper if/else-enabled languages, once it fails to do if/else properly.
I will explain.
MONEY.
I'll tell you - because there are no alternatives.
If you're a non-tech company (or the government), there is simply no way to hire the number of people needed for a large project. It's very, very difficult (if you aren't a software company) to build a team that's any better than what a consulting company will assemble for you. And besides, you might need them all only for a few years.
That leaves the company (or govt) dependant on an IT services vendor. Now why Accenture? Scale. If you're the government (or Coca Cola), you can't risk going to a vendor who has a 1000 employees. There would just not be enough depth if something goes wrong, and they'll lack mature Business Continuity processes. That leaves you with big IT vendors with global prescence.
Now, you could take a chance with a smaller vendor. But if anything went wrong, you're going to get fired for it. With Accenture, you are less likely to.
How about other more legit consulting firms like exponent (https://www.exponent.com/)?
What GP is getting at is that it's a big 'if'. How would you know? Every vendor under the sun is going to promise the world to you, how do vet them?
And it takes a cultural shift (and a significant premium over what FAANG is offering) to attract the required talent.
But they are a relatively innovative co who have outlived peers and pioneers like GEISCO, EDS and the like, who were not innovative at all. For example, some time or the other in their lives, they depended on a captive set of clients and then the rot set in.
Today, Accenture is indistinguishable from Tata, Infosys and other successful outsourcers. Now you no longer find truckloads of Accenture partners and partner wannabes in tailgate parties e.g., when the Buckeyes visit Ann Arbor.
The staffing mix has changed considerably. The ACN offices in and around the Great Lakes region do not confine their recruitment to Michigan, Michigan State, OSU or Case Western. There are more there now who are alumni of Bangalore and Mumbai universities.
FWIW yes, I have both seen and worked on projects that were delivered on time, on budget, and were considered a success, but those metrics are hardly an indicator of anything useful.
Estimation isn't an exact science, and estimating exactly on target for a major project with a big team is about as hard as it gets.
Honestly, the -only- projects I've worked on that haven't succeeded, on time, on budget, involved consultancies. I'm not saying that's necessarily the consultancies' fault, but there are perverse incentives in place, on both sides, and that favors a lot of upfront design work and CYA, rather than agility, responsibility, and responding to new information.
Doing the same as a consultant is two problems: (1) doing the hard thing & (2) finding the right internal people & getting necessary information out of them.
Consultants are better at (1) than internal teams, more often than not. (Excluding modern tech companies)
I have yet to be convinced that anyone is good enough at (2), that a more successful plan isn't avoiding it altogether
I worked for a tools company and we were the ones pointing out that the consultant's solution, intended to be a consumer application exposed to the world, was not written to actually have multiple nodes for any sort of scale up or fail-over. When they added that, we were the ones that pointed out it fell over at 10 RPS and didn't recover without human intervention. Etc.
I think you're maybe explicitly thinking of internal IT groups, rather than internal software groups, and I would agree with that, because, again, misaligned incentives. IT is all about preventing change; you don't want to risk breaking key services, and so you try and ensure that every interest has a representative and that change only happens when all of them sign off on it. That is a very slow and very flawed way to create -new- things of value, and because of that, deferring all of that to a different entity makes a lot of sense. Just, that different entity can be an internal software group more efficiently than an external one, I've found.
Maybe a 'one true Scotsman' argument, but every 'software group' that was a part of IT that I've seen might as well be called the 'personal project group', because they spent more time working on those than they did making progress in that environment.
If IT sucks for people who want to change things and roll out new and exciting products, most of those people will... not work in IT.
Consequently, when you're soliciting ideas from your team, there aren't any of those people to speak up.
And if no one asks "Why are we doing this?" or "What if we did this differently?", then it's much easier to pretend another way doesn't exist.
> If you gave out a time and materials contract without clear acceptance criteria, testing requirements, and verification / support / warranty detailed, you probably shouldn’t be handling 100 million dollar budgets. This is the money quote.
Big 4 companies (Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG) are historically accounting auditing companies. And their culture is heavily skewed towards billing their employees to clients per hour/day, or per unit of service, as auditors and lawyers have been doing for more than a century. It is not in their DNA to "create products" but to "render services"; that is, to sell employees availability. Boundaries and scope of those traditional services are typically clearer than building a new unknown program from scratch.
If you are hiring these firms for exploration of how do you work, how you should work, and a complete functioning system that sustains a big number of new processes that are not yet defined, you are in for a big bill; you better be sure that you have put on the time to think about what you are buying in written form. When you see big failed projects like those the problem lies in that no one stopped to research the complexity of the ask before entering into a contract.
Even then, these consultancies normally are very flexible when a contract is actively harming the client, and the client wishes to change it / stop it (it would not be good for the business to do otherwise, because you want to see more after this contract is finished). When these costs go out of control is because internal politics in the client impede the rational decisions of killing projects, changing command, etc., and the sponsor keeps feeding money into the project to save their ass.
Source: worked in big 4 for years.
To be fair, I think your point about "except for very boutique consultancies" may apply to his recommendation. I can't imagine him advocating for an Accenture or similar, instead the message is bring on expertise for specific initiatives as needed.
And disturbingly accurate, as once you strip away the admittedly really quite nice typography from Accenture documents like this, you are left with just absolute pablum.
https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/Thought-Leadership-Asset...
(Edit: Wow, they apparently used the phrase “Thought Leadership” in this file name without irony.)
I think a far better question is: Does whoever is paying for these decks to be prepared believe in them? These decks aren't (always) built for internal use.
“Broadband and 5G will be life-essential for most”
Well no shit, Sherlock.
This reads like those AI-generated documents.
I once worked at a firm not unlike Accenture - essentially management consulting - and was on a project that ended up being a frontend reskin of a Fortune 500 company website.
But at the project inception I was asked to scope the project and no one, either on our side, or the client side knew what the scope was. So I put line items in with pretty large time estimations as placeholders for the skinning their SaaS application as well as the website.
The client glazed over the Gantt chart (created in MS Project) and signed off on it.
In the end, we did design, frontend build and integration oversight on about 15 templates of their .com. This is the kind of thing any run of the mill digital agency could and would do for 50k. We charged them 2.1M.
This kind of project (now with AI/ML/Blockchain!) is Accenture and the like's bread and butter.
Or would you prefer to work w/ a client that lowballs you on fees, promises that that the requirements are final, and then balks at paying more in order to complete the inevitable expansion of requirements?
In the last few years I've created some of those Powerpoints, and have realized the value in them (not saying that all are valuable). I've been asked questions like:
- We're a year in to a data warehouse migration and have nothing to show for it. What happened, where do we go from here, and how much will it cost? - We'd like to outsource a call center, but don't know where to start both on the tech and process sides. Can you help? - We have a business idea, but know little about technology. Can you put together a plan, so that we know how much we'll need to invest? Oh, and can you design the architecture and tell us which cloud to use?
There's tons of rigorous analysis, interviews, and research that goes into answering these questions well enough that they can be trusted. Since it's primarily an exercise in critical thinking, mileage probably varies depending on who is doing the work. There are plenty of bad Powerpoints I've seen out there that don't move the needle or add anything new.
It's not.
It's tool used to communicate a deliverable.
The actual deliverable is knowledge of the processes, infrastructure, market, industry, options, etc. And an answer to an original question posed that required that knowledge.
A good Powerpoint seems obvious -- because that's literally the definition of a good presentation of the above deliverable.
If I clearly communicate my summarized facts to you, and then draw an obvious conclusion, does that not seem obvious? But that's forgetting that before the presentation, and before the research behind the presentation, none of those facts were known!
Let's take an example. A customer wants to expose my employer's application to external partners / customers / whatever and they need guidance on how to do this. There are a few models on how to do this with positives and negatives:
1. Place a server in a DMZ 2. Reverse Proxy traffic in 3. Have a separate site in a DMZ and programmatically push content there
Sure, I could get on a call and verbally describe those options. But it's infinitely easier to put up a few architecture diagrams which visually depict the options with call outs to considerations with each.
It's fair to ask why can't this be documented in a technical brief / whitepaper / documentation. Well, it is, at least mostly. It's out there. We send links to plenty of documentation. What documentation is extraordinarily bad at is explaining nuance. Best practices are fine, but best practices have a set of assumptions. Those assumptions may be generally true but are entirely simplistic at the margins.
Back to my example. Should we document how the interaction between the DoD's various network segments (think NIPR and SIPR)? Would it shock you that various groups inside of individual branches of the DoD interpret things differently? What about an organization where this use case is the first external exposure of internally deployed software?
Ultimately a good use of the PowerPoint medium is to reduce complexity to the essentials, allow for framing of the underlying issues, and to be used as a pivot to discuss broader strategy. No argument from me that many uses of PowerPoint are laughable. But there's a whole sphere of the technology realm which involve sales, sales adjacent, or strategic discussions where PowerPoint or similar techniques are essential when more formal documentation has not settled things.
I clearly am also being snarky/sarcastic. They do know more than this and they do more than this. But there is a some real truth to the matter, that consultants never quite lose that idea that their job is to do snazzy presentations, and that ends up getting more focus than delivering product.
Yes, consultancies like Accenture are copy-cat enterprises. A few decades ago they truly provided the brightest and the best of off-shore, inexpensive technical labor. But that changed with the H-1B tsunami that followed. The meme that America's social strengths could be used against it were not lost on these now global software powerhouses.
Many of the initial H-1B waves of individuals worked their way into America's corporate C-Suites. The technical waves were followed by well-to-do, class entitlement waves of individuals who co-opted the POC cohort required to satisfy equal opportunity hiring laws.
More recently, HR departments themselves have been out-sourced within the enterprises. The combination of the gutting of full-time technical staff AND the tight coupling of off-shoring to onshore expat cohorts completes the cycle of how Western enterprises were carved out of any capability to develop projects internally. They've been gutted.
In America, citizen POC were left on the outside looking in (aaaaaaaand, here we are in social crisis) in addition to bearing witness to the soft takeover of the corporate management ranks.
The Powerpoint slides are perfunctory. Our corporations are now as technically proficient as many dysfunctional outsourcing countries are at a functional level. The onshore benches represent the warehousing of local candidates to make way for politically and legally correct outsiders.
Creative consulting is also a scam and is often the opposite of creative. You ideally want these creative types in house to change things instead, because creative consulting really changes nothing.
The promises of AI are also mostly a scam. The breakthroughs and discoveries made are often intellectually bankrupt. People drool from the correlations that are drawn from AI, even though there is no explanation for why this is occurring in real life. It is also making a lot of people’s jobs into “BS jobs”.
That said, my opinion of management consulting is similarly low.
While people often criticize consulting companies for barely knowing what they're doing, the flip side of this is that the people at the company hiring them don't necessarily know what they're doing either :D There's a lot of people coasting along in corporate IT.
That said, I'm very much aware of the onshore consulting that ACN does. And in my time in the ACN world, I was never once impressed with work ACN did - onshore or offshore.
The fluff is a thing...
Luckily I get to lead a lot of what I do and in the applied intelligence organization where we're doing some interesting things as well as some fairly advanced engineering.
While searching for this link, the next link google offered was this:
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-s...
No, that would be McKinsey.
Well done Steve, you've become iconic.
What, Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm?!? Is it warships or aeroplanes that Accenture builds nowadays?
and I think the articles cover most of these points. And as for the Hertz example. So a big company is sued by someone for not doing what they promised ? Is that something surprising ? Is it something that only happens in consulting domain? The answer to the second and third questions are no. All the flag bearers of silicon valley have been sued from being in "villan" at some point. Like a successful business Accenture has nailed it core business model. From technology perspective sure the big picture looks bleak But it's not always dark "_Tech consulting definitely does have its bright spots. Accenture has smaller divisions like Accenture Interactive that work on pretty cool stuff, like a partnership with Disney on a new innovation lab and a collaboration with Apple on iOS business solutions. And if you’re a new college grad, associate positions can be fast ways to learn engineering on the job and get exposure to large scale systems that you wouldn’t otherwise work with._"
From tech perspective it might seem like a shoddy company but we need to understand that it's not out there to make the best software for your needs it's their to make _a_ software for your needs one that just gets the work done.
The clients which approach Accenture or for that matter any tech consulting company are out there to get their problems solved within a budget.
To get a solution that just works
And I don't believe every project of theirs is shitty.Because if quality was too much compromised then they would lose market value and there is no shortage of competition.
While sales pitch is important for any business to work without successful projects a business cannot survive.They must have had success in the recent past that is why they are getting work. From a creative software engineers perspective its a Very shitty company because it doesn't care about the tech, But That's not its core business model ;to make great tech. The core model is to sell tech as a service to non tech companies. And make non tech companies harness tech for their needs. tech consulting should be treated as a different domain from technology. And in this domain some are good at it and some are shitty and then there is Accenture , somewhere in the middle.
Ps: I'm not defending Accenture I just don't agree with all conclusions presented in the HN comments.
Also, occasionally, there is some actual dev/implementation work that accompanies the PowerPoints. This work is carried out, poorly, by offshore resources who are certified in as many certifications as possible. Certifications are extremely important for them, because otherwise, when these resources are on the bench, they'd have nothing else to do.
Oh, also, Blockchain. And AI. These are important concepts for Accenture, and it's totally okay if clients pay millions of dollars for blockchain/AI solutions that massively disappoint, because innovation.
Source: worked at a subsidiary of ACN for a few years, interacted with the ACN folks quite a bit, and while my description above is obviously snarky/sarcastic, it surprisingly isn't really that far from the truth.
In summation, I have absolutely no idea why Accenture is worth $140B.