Anecdotal, and I avoid judging the merits of any company based on a single employee, but the only Accenture staff I know lives here in SE Asia and she's offshore labour. When I've talked to her, I found it interesting that she had great difficulty explaining what she does at Accenture. What I gather is that it does indeed involve a lot of PowerPoint slides, Excel spreadsheets, scheduling apps, and mostly "workflow" type productivity. I've never been able to find out if they actually make anything, but I suspect not.

It honestly sounds like a lot of busywork and pretending to be busy.

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.

If only you could get the projects _prior_ to Accenture screwing them up. Just eliminate the middleman, yaknow?

The reason Accenture is as successful as they are is because they have a top-notch sales engine. But it’s well known they’re just as full of BS as the big 4 consulting firms, except the big 4 have some niches that they’re really good in. As far as I can tell, Accenture is a consulting sales engine with an offshore body shop attached.

That is literally their purpose. Don't want to go through the hassle of offshoring your entire IT / enginering or other division, and will be gone before the inevitable rot and overages kick in? Accenture will happily do that for you, and figure out how to abuse the H1b program enough to fill as many bodies with offshore people in your onshore location as you need to justify your realestate purchase.

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.

Accenture is just the one where the “white face” runs the show so they can charge higher bill rates. Companies HQed in India (TCS, Wipro, etc) just hire white people to talk to senior leaders (which is so common I have literally been called the “white face” multiple times as a Caucasian person delivering consulting services to enterprise IT orgs despite working for a company that only staffs on-shore).

Yeah, exactly. I was in that role, though it took me a few months to figure out that that's really what it was.

Do you have any insight into how their sales engine works? I'm curious because it's a shame that projects go to companies like Accenture when are so many qualified teams out there.

(A) Existing relation with customer (including pre-negotiated MLA that legal signed off on, and ranch rates) & (B) safety of a big company (if project fails, legal can threaten and Accenture will throw bodies at it to mostly-finish).

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 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.

It's impossible, there are layers and layers of management that need to see Accenture fails before trying a more rational alternative.

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'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.

At least they don't have to put any effort into setting customer expectations :D.

This is what Accenture is very good at - selling into large orgs.

That would involve attracting good developers though. Few companies manage to do that, especially if the job involves integrating ERP systems.

As ex-Accenture, I can totally believe you. I was once on a project where a guy took more than a month to deliver a codebase that was negative in value - we spent more dev time untangling and cleaning up the utter cr*p that he produced than it would have taken to scrap the whole thing and rewrite it from scratch.