Re:Accenture will get rid of annual performance reviews and ...
by protomyth on Friday July 24, 2015 @11:54AM
(#9942822)
One other little tactic used my on-site folks is to make everyone else look crappy (employees and contractors from other companies) except the employees who directly affect the contract. That way the client gets rid of these undesirables and brings in more of your people thus increasing your revenue.
Accenture played this game quite well, made for some very unfun working environments for friends of mine. I was lucky enough to work at places that didn't have the big contracting companies when I was doing consulting.
Like all software projects, there are big error bars on all time estimates; it could take X hours or 0.5X hours or 2X hours, even without scope changes. With scope changes, all bets are off. The deal you strike with the client makes this clear - you estimate X hours, but you can bill them anything from 0.5X hours to 2X hours.
If you assign one competent engineer to the project, they'll bill X hours.
If you assign two competent engineers to the project, they'll each bill 0.55X hours for a total of 1.1X hours billed (the extra 0.1X is due to communications overhead)
But if you assign one competent engineer and one incompetent engineer, the competent engineer will bill 0.8X hours completing the project and the incompetent engineer will bill 0.8X hours - for a total of 1.6X hours billed.
In other words, if a project has one competent engineer, adding a competent engineer adds 0.1X to revenue but adding an incompetent engineer adds 0.6X to revenue.
How do you suppose these incentives work out in practice?