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

Re:Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went l... by alexose on Thursday July 21, 2022 @05:55PM (#32185692)

I worked alongside one of these firms on a government contract. I was impressed by how perfectly optimized they were to extract money. The team's function was to report perfect KPIs at all costs. Managers spent virtually all their time bringing in more developers.

Because "delivering a usable product" wasn't incentivized (specifically the 'usable' part, or what usability even meant), it was simply a race to generate specs, report on them with glowing optimism, and then stick as close to the letter of the specs as possible.

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Re:Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went l... by zdragnar on Thursday July 21, 2022 @06:35PM (#32186077)

Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together.

At least, that's the theory of why the insurance marketplace failed so spectacularly.

Once you get to an organization of a certain size- private or public- the people with purchasing power are never the ones who need to use the service. As such, purchases are never made with the end users in mind. Instead, there'll be a list of checkboxes of things that sound nice, and if you're lucky, that list wasn't specially crafted to exclude everyone other than some Manager's buddy's business.

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Re:Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went l... by cratermoon on Thursday July 21, 2022 @07:46PM (#32186705)

> Actually having a usable product is missing from most government specs. Individual components get built by different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure that they are built such that they work together.

That sounds like a certain "mega moon rocket" that's been under construction for some time.

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Re:Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went l... by p_l on Friday July 22, 2022 @04:13AM (#32189751)

That one got the added "benefit" of Congress and POTUS directly meddling. So you get to restart parts with new contractors, changes in direction just as you got the last 20% of bugs fixed etc and that's assuming you work with honest suppliers

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Re:Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went l... by SoftTalker on Thursday July 21, 2022 @09:06PM (#32187270)

And "managing expectations." If I heard that phrase once I heard it every day.

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Re:Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went l... by djmips on Thursday July 21, 2022 @11:25PM (#32188136)

As overused as it is, it still has a core usefulness. Over-promising and under-delivering is never a good thing no matter what the situation.

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Re:Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went l... by SoftTalker on Friday July 22, 2022 @12:29AM (#32188539)

Yes but these big systems consulting companies always over-promise. Once they win the project, they shift immediately to "managing expectations."

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