Car Rental Company Hertz Sues Accenture Over $32M Website Project (theregister.co.uk) 191
Car rental giant Hertz is suing consultancy firm Accenture over a website redesign. From a report: The US corporation hired monster management consultancy firm Accenture in August 2016 to completely revamp its online presence. The new site was due to go live in December 2017. But a failure to get on top of things led to a delay to January 2018, and then a second delay to April 2018 which was then also missed, we're told. As Hertz endured the delays, it found itself immersed in a nightmare: a product and design that apparently didn't do half of what was specified and still wasn't finished. "By that point, Hertz no longer had any confidence that Accenture was capable of completing the project, and Hertz terminated Accenture," the car rental company complained in a lawsuit lodged against Accenture in New York this month.
Hertz is suing for the $32m it paid Accenture in fees to get to that aborted stage, and it wants more millions to cover the cost of fixing the mess. "Accenture never delivered a functional website or mobile app," Hertz claimed. Accenture told El Reg on Tuesday this week it believes Hertz's lawsuit is "without merit."
Hertz is suing for the $32m it paid Accenture in fees to get to that aborted stage, and it wants more millions to cover the cost of fixing the mess. "Accenture never delivered a functional website or mobile app," Hertz claimed. Accenture told El Reg on Tuesday this week it believes Hertz's lawsuit is "without merit."
All companies are software dev houses (Score:5, Insightful)
It is 2019. If you do not have the willingness to invest in operate and run your own software stack, you're not going to succeed in the long term as a business.
consultancies held at arms length will never know your business to the level of detail they need to, and will always be subject to requirements that are poorly defined or impossible to deliver on.
sure, internal stuff can be subject to the same problems, but it need not be.
That's not the problem I see (Score:3)
Companies have been treating employees as disposable for 20 years now and, well, a lot of employees have started doing the same.
On the plus side (for the companies that is) we're heading for another Global Recession so I suspect that'll end soon, but for right this moment jobs aren't something you think of long term, they're a stepping sto
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There are strong short term incentives to make getting it wrong much more likely. The drivers of the project want to downplay the risks. The vendor wants to downplay the risks (figuring if they can get it half working, the customer will be practically forced to cough up the money to finish it). The CEO and board want feel like they are adding value by driving down the nominal price tag via second guessing the project leader.
I once worked in a company that did big enterprise projects, competing directly w
re: consultants (Score:2)
I think there's a lot of merit to your argument that these projects are better tackled with in-house staff. I've worked at places where projects were handled internally, while others used consulting firms and it truly is the former where the projects better achieve the goals in the intended time-frame.
Ultimately though? I think it always comes down to the money. The employers who hire permanent staff as their developers for an in-house application are saddled with that endless, ongoing expense of paying th
Re: consultants (Score:5, Insightful)
Consulting Motto
"If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem."
Sounds like someone as Accenture was taking that to heart.
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Quite often you don't need to put any effort into prolonging the problem. Just keep on delivering what your customer wants. When they change their mind send them a bill.
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The answer to this really is "staff augmentation". I hate to say this but my observation is this model works. I hate it because I have been the programmer wonder if the pink slip is coming and if my seat will be filled with a contractor. I have been the team lead jealously wanting to maintain my direct reports etc.
The think is you need to manage the technical aspects of the project in house. You need have your own senior level people, though they don't have to be super stars, to call the architectural s
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With consultants, you can at least in theory pay them an agreed upon figure, expect a certain result, and then stop paying them until the next time you need assistance with it.
As I am sure you already understand, the rub is that "certain result" part is a dubious assertion. The complexity of requirements is really easy to underestimate, and hired guns do not automatically get it right, just because you are betting $10m or $100m that they will.
Sounds like the perfect "Agile" project (Score:3)
Re:Sounds like the perfect "Agile" project (Score:4, Informative)
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You seem confused about what agile is - its simply about breaking the problem down into digestible chunks, and having the team commit commit to getting specific work done in a time period. This puts more control back in the hands of the developer, and help management understand progress as well as better predict how long things will take.
Recall that the way we used to do things was waterfall which meant the dev team would disappear for a year or two and emerge with maybe something.
The rest of it sounds like
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Exactly. An agile form of website design is to deliver an MVP part of their website working ASAP, and get continuous feedback .
Getting to the tail end of 32 million dollars before you realize the whole project is a flop is the diametric opposite of agile. That classic waterfall.
And agile site redesign would have been broken down into small changes bit by bit and would have been delivered incrementally. The nice thing about websites is that you can change the styles of your existing site to match the new one
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Agile is a manifesto, you are thinking of formal 'agile' methods like scrum (spit).
At the end of the day, scrum is basically fast iteration waterfall with all steps renamed and extra useless meetings.
Wrong. (Score:2)
A clearly specced project needn't be developed with agile software development methods. Hertz migrating their web setup to a new level is no where near anything requiring agility. It does however require people who know what they are doing. And, yes, those who don't often like to throw buzzwords around without having the faintest idea of their meaning. And yes "Agile" is one of those words these days. The correct term btw. is "agility". And it's required for customers who don't know what they want until you
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Classic software development morass possibly arising from:
Poor methodology. When done correctly Agile works; done poorly its a disaster! ....when will we ever learn?
Incomplete and changing requirements
Inexperienced managers and programmers
Unrealistic sales deliverables
Outsourced software contractors with no long term motivation but profit.
What you describe isn't Agile done poorly... it ceases to be Agile. But I know that was your real point.
I am going through this now at work. There is no way for the core team, who has all of the business knowledge, to get project A done by Deadline X. It can't be done, even if we had decent starting requirements - which we don't. Unwilling to cut any scope. Line in the sand deadline. So what does upper management do? Why, we'll get more people to do all the "easy" work. So now we have two consulting
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One of the foundational insights of Agile is that requirements can be expected to change. Agile gives a toolkit that makes it more likely to build a constructive conversation around the uncertainties.
Every philosophy sucks if applied poorly. Agile is not automatically better or worse than any other, in that regard.
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When done correctly Agile works; done poorly its a disaster!
Whoa... just like Communism!!
;-)
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Every methodology is shit if applied poorly. The real question is which philosophy is more likely to succeed for the problem on hand in the context that exists. Waterfall is a perfectly fine methodology for certain problems under certain contexts. Ditto Agile.
No methodology will survive contractors that game the crudest way possible, e.g. refuse to meet the terms and give a "whatever, it will cost you extra" late in the timeline.
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Agile is a manifesto. Scrum is a (shit) methodology.
'Agile' is two pages of truth, but with no way to implement it and it's very dependant on language. PHBs only read the parts they like.
Most claims of Agility amount to ambidextrous fapping. If you're looking, treat claims of agility with great skepticism. Agile _starts_ with teams of 'competent enthusiastic individuals', without that step the rest is useless hot air.
Scrum treats individuals as replaceable cogs, scrum almost can't be agile. If it eve
Accenture (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the mid-nineties, when they were still Anderson Consulting, I worked with a ton of them. Mostly right out of college. Really bright people... with *NO* experience in the real world of programming.
And the way Anderson treated them... I'll bet $5 that the team(s) working on the Hertz website and app were working 50 or 60 hours a week, and breaking 70 some weeks, and having to respond to calls and texts at all hours, with no chance at ever getting comp time, and, why, you're listed as a contractor, and the NLRB website has rules making it next to impossible to form a union.
You think I'm exaggerating? I knew one guy who told me that one week, he'd put in 119 hours. I'm NOT exaggerating, and they "helped" him do it.
But we don't need unions (or holidays, or vacation time, or time when you're not working)....
Re:Accenture (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll bet $5 that the team(s) working on the Hertz website and app were working 50 or 60 hours a week
You can bet more than $5 that the teams working on this were in India and have no idea how a car rental company in the US operates.
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There's no call for that. The GPs point is valid. I rented a car in Greece once. A guy in a t-shirt drove up in a car, waved to me, we signed a rental agreement on the hood, he gave me the keys, and walked away.
None of the "sir, we don't have the compact car you reserved, but I can offer you a great deal on this luxury SUV instead" bull. Not even an offer to turn on the GPS for a fee.
Things work differently in different places. Anybody who's any good at specifying requirements probably doesn't need to contr
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Exactly this! If you don't understand the client's culture and customs, you don't even know what to ask in order to define requirements. All cultures have a large body of unwritten assumptions that we don't even think about.
It doesn't help that requirements gathering is frequently considered pre-contract negotiation. Really understanding the requirements involves a level of diligence and research that nobody is going to commit to without a paying contract.
It USED to be understood that a successful software
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A long time ago, when I was taking computer science, one of the professors explained to us the job of a systems analyst. We were mostly of the "code like hell" development philosophy, but a few carefully chosen assignments convinced us of the importance of planning.
I frequently notice today how a day of planning often translates into a surprisingly small amount of code. Not doing the planning certainly does result in more lines of code. Especially if you consider all the rewrites.
Libertarian point of view [Re:Accenture] (Score:4, Interesting)
The libertarian argument is that the 119 hour guy can go elsewhere if he doesn't like the conditions; nobody is forcing him to work there.
I've personally been in a similar boat during a recession and it's not pleasant. Not a lot of alternatives during recessions. It's my opinion that unions and regulations offer a safety net to make the road of life less bumpy. True, you may not fly as high during good times, but won't crash as hard during the bad times.
Libertarians would probably counter that a rough and tumble life strengthens discipline and weeds out "loser" genetics from the population.
They have their right to want to make life like a giant horse farm and/or a corporate Mad Max style world, but they can't force others to agree with such a system (or lack of system). There's no universal logic of the uniserve that dictates how civilization "should be" ran; it can only tell us trade-offs at best.
The libertarian may counter that bad things will happen if humans are not "properly" bred and/or disciplined, but their line of reasoning has too many speculative layers and assumptions about the future to be taken as a definitive answer. It's just a big guess. My big guess is just as valid.
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If you're working on your own, you're responsible for yourself. That means building up a big enough nest egg to get you through recessions and tough times. If you fail to do that, the fault
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I did, but when I got married and had kids, the nest egg went kaflooey. If you haven't done so, you may not understand.
It may take several years of (bad) experience to learn the right fit. It's not like we can just change life's channels.
You are exagge
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Society in general agrees to a kind of insurance policy that smooths over the consequences of our mistakes to a degree.
Even in the hunter-gatherer days, if a tribe member broke their leg, they helped them out instead of letting them starve. The fossil record shows that going way back. They could have instead said, "you deserve to starve for walking carelessly." That's essentially what you seem to be saying on a larger scale. Please correct me if I characterized i
ah yes, Libertarians (Score:4, Insightful)
John Rogers: There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
You having enough money for a basic level of existence and save up for a nest egg means the vice president of your division will see smaller dividends, and might have to slum it in a Gulfstream III instead of having a Gulfstream IV. [cc.com] Your boss will lose her bonus for not keeping payroll costs down. So the "responsible" thing for a peon to do is eat Ramen for three meals a day for forty years, so you can buy a one-bedroom apartment you can retire to a couple years before you die.
Right, it's all about life choices! And why haven't you "chosen" to be a billionaire with your own yacht [justpo.st] and personal island in the Caribbean?
Fixed.
Eitist palbum (Score:2)
As is usually the case, when capitalists think they are throwing shade at socialism, its just a case of projection. It's capitalism, not socialism, that enriches a tiny handful of people who don't have to work for a living, that creates incentives to drive companies into the ground in pursuit of short term profits, and keep
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I've always come from the point of view that a decent social safety net gives me the freedom to take more risks, and better improve myself. If I'm in a job that sucks, I'm glad that leaving it won't put me at risk of losing my healthcare, and if I get laid off, I have some support to allow me to pause and potentially wait to find a better position if I'm not exactly thrilled with the first one that comes along.
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Where's the strawman?
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If I'm wrong or misrepresenting their philosophy, you are perfectly welcome to present the truth. There's no need to imply malice here, whatsoever. In fact, it would be more efficient to just give the truth then and there rather than waste text on accusations. Double Sin.
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Right, because you correct everybody that constructs dishonest strawmen about your position?
We'll just let you continue to wallow in it, demonstrate your stupidity.
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And the way Anderson treated them... I'll bet $5 that the team(s) working on the Hertz website and app were working 50 or 60 hours a week
I know several people who work for Accenture. You're right they do work 50-60 hour weeks. But they are $500 teams. These consultants get phenomenal amounts of money and the people I know (both got their jobs straight out of uni) are stupidly well paid which I can't even match with my oil industry income.
Oh two of them just went on a sabbatical. Well not quite. They weren't paid while they took 6 months leave to go trek through Africa. But they were nice enough to get their long holidays paid out so they bas
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Back in the mid-nineties, when they were still Anderson Consulting, I *was* one of them. All of the parent's post are pretty accurate. Some of my colleagues were working 90+ hours when deadlines were near.
Unfortunately, the partners would take advantage of the green beans, who were bright about the work itself, but clueless about their own value and career development. Even with all that, it was a great learning experience, and I have lasting friendships with colleagues from that time.
Would I hire them to w
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I want half of that $5:
Re:Accenture == bad (Score:2)
I worked as a sub-contractor with Anderson Consulting in the 90's as well. The Joke with them was the saying "When you hire Anderson Consulting, they back the school bus up to your back door." They have been sued more times than I can count for botched IT implementations. Especially SAP ones! This one doesn't surprise me....
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But we don't need unions (or holidays, or vacation time, or time when you're not working)....
Really dude? REALLY? You see a problem with labor and the ONLY solution you can come up with involves things that have been tried already with results so disastrous that people were murdered, criminals became wealthy and powerful, and the landscape burnt to the ground... but, there were some good sides to it.
Get the fuck outta here with that Union bullshit. Come up with a better solution or just shut up. We already know how the union thing goes and it is better to let everything burn to the ground "naturall
This is the norm and has been for years... (Score:2, Interesting)
When you hire Accenture (or any of the big 5) you get:
1. Senior person with some experience
5 Junior people with zero experience
All of them at the same "blended" bill rate for your convenience.
Anymore all these people are doing anyway is taking your requirements and translating them into Indian for off-shore development.
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That makes it sound too much like you might get deliverables.
If I recall (Score:3)
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There's a thing about consultants, you typically get back what you put in (that is in terms of effort, not dollars). Accenture is know for some major screw-ups, it's also known for a phenomenal amount of successes. It fundamentally puts them in the same league as most large consultants.
Whenever I hear stories like this Hertz one, or the EA one I can't help but hope that the person on Hertz or EA's side who didn't know how to manage consultants, expectations, project requirements, etc got fired. Major projec
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How? My bets are on some interface awfulness between Kronos and the company's other software systems, some weird under-the-table payment accounting dodge that showed up too obviously in Kronos' reports and couldn't be hidden, or corporate unwillingness to change anything in their practices to help integrate the system in question (the thinking being "We paid a lot for this software! Why should we be doing the changing?").
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How?
We are just *that* fucking good. My other recent favourite is we finally retired our custom made in house expense tracking solution and switched to Concur. Somehow we carried all the stupidity from our solution across including fields like "Receipt Yes / No" despite the fact that Concur internally manages which receipts are required or not, and doesn't even bother flagging an expense if this custom field disagrees with the requirement for an expense.
But the best part is that we can now upload our receipts d
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By the way I work for one of the top 20 largest companies in the world.
Finally! (Score:2, Interesting)
Good god. Accenture has a TERRIBLE track record. They fucked up the London Stock Exchange a few years ago:
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1588339/london-stock-exchange-switches-linux
I also happen to know they fucked up the University of Minnesota's accounting system in the early/mod 2000s. I saw the after-effects from a form GF who worked with the system, and heard about the serious, serious fuckups they created through a colleague that works at the UMN. Former GF described it as like working
Did they ar least get (Score:2)
a Flashing "Under Construction" GIF?
You have to wonder who was writing the contracts, requirement docs, and tracking the work.
It's really not rocket surgery...
Mismanagement and bad promises (Score:2)
$32,000,000 is a lot of money, but it's not really THAT much money. A firm can burn through that pretty quickly if you put dozens of people on a project (each with $100,000/year salaries). You need designers, brand experts, project managers, user experience experts, QA testers, web accessibility reviewers, etc. on top of the usual (and more expensive) developers and DBAs.
Then you mix in the billable hours for meetings with the client before, during, and after the launch.
Then you have bad PHB salespeople you
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Saw two rather large projects go down the tubes, each after spending half a *billion* (USD)
The first was supposed to simply replace an old system, mostly assembler, with something more modern (a mix of C and Oracle). Seven years later, with insane scope creep, the people running the project tried to roll out a limited deployment ... which was so bad that sales people actually quit in the 'test' locations, because they couldn't work. Microsoft Business Consultation was brought in, and, after a couple of mo
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there is the backdoor way to get back at them ding (Score:2)
there is the backdoor way to get back at them just do an extreme ding and dent overview anytime some from Accenture rents a car. $500-$1000 a pop add's up.
Statement of claims (Score:5, Funny)
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They should have hired the obamacare website guys (Score:2)
Holy crap - $32 million?! (Score:3)
For $32 million I'd do it, including starting a company to get'r done. Heck, I'd take $30 million.
I can see how this happened (I used to work at GE). Hertz thought they could outsource the whole thing and didn't put anyone in charge of it. They probably didn't look for demos or do any acceptance testing as they went. No driving the consultants. If anyone was in charge I'll bet the B-team at Hertz so they willingly accepted delays. At GE I saw fairly large outsource projects managed by 1 or 2 people. 1 was a technical manager who had his normal day jobs to manage, and the 2nd person was a junior engineer who a) had a day job b) would raise interesting "that doesn't work" issues and nobody would listen. On smaller jobs 1 person would fill both roles. Why Hertz went $32mm before pulling the plug is fascinating, hopefully a few people at Hertz have been reassigned or "decided to pursue other opportunities."
Gosh, If I divided that in half (16mm) and then divided that by $120,000 (a terrific salary) - I could hire 133 people (for a year). Of course not everyone makes $120k. A staff of 50 people over 2 or 3 years is easily supported by that money. $16mm for operating costs + $16mm for 50 people 3 years.
$32mm and it wasn't done. omg
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For $32 million I'd do it, including starting a company to get'r done. Heck, I'd take $30 million.
Hey Hertz, I'd gladly fail for a mere $1 million, in half the time!
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$32mm and it wasn't done. omg
I'm willing to bet you for $32mm it was already done twice, and the requirements have changed yet again. People like blaming consultants, but nearly always it's the project management on the client side that causes the problem.
You could not afford the sales and marketing (Score:2)
Do you think Hertz would sign up with someone like you?
You need top, well connected salsemen, and they are not cheap. You need lots of "corporate presence", also not cheap.
The actual development is just an afterthought. Which might explain a few things...
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Gosh, If I divided that in half (16mm) and then divided that by $120,000 (a terrific salary) - I could hire 133 people (for a year).
This is how I know you are not a business owner. An employees total cost to the business is roughly twice as much as you are enumerating. If an employee is grossing $120k, that employee is actually costing the employer $240k (roughly).
There are many "taxes" that you don't see and are (seemingly) completely unaware of.
That being said, your numbers are still reasonable other than you get 25 people instead of 50. Still it could have and should have been quite profitably doable.
Oh, yes, please sue them... (Score:2)
... into next Wednesday. I'm grabbing some popcorn, this is going to be fun.
Finally some big news on some end customer shafting some big ass consultancy over a major web project fuck up. This happens way to rarely IMHO. It would happen more often if I were on the customer end of things. Usually I only get to watch criminally clueless agency PMs churn out disasters like this and then blame it on the devs.
*Sits back*
Praise Avis (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why the Krill worship Avis.
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Yep (Score:2)
I don't understand how this became a news story (Score:2)
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In my experience, the big issue ist hat people pick the lowest bidder. My rule of thumb is that if you have three bids, the lowest one is probably lying through their teeth, the middle one is probably reasonable but might be fibbing, and the high one is probably too expensive. As such, always go with the middle one.
Easy to understand how this happened. (Score:2)
(this [wordpress.com]) × (large company) = $32M worth of failure.
Same problem in our company, smaller scale (Score:2)
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Downside of a small one is they are no doubt incorporated and have 'empty pockets'.
Now you get to pay lawyers five times budget.
Summary: (Score:2)
The needful was not done.
Definition of failing: getting sued by your client (Score:2)
Accenture is ultimately at fault here by definition.
Any company that proposes a solution, least of all one as large as them, has facilities to deal with project creep, understands legacy technology, etc., and has provisions in their contract to deal with this. Obviously we don't know all the details, and I have no doubt that the client may have had a nightmare system and potentially unrealistic requirements, BUT if you're a contractor, it's your job to anticipate this mess and allocate appropriate time and
Strange choice (Score:2)
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Because you have to integrate with several different legacy systems, each with their own peculiarities.
Re:how!?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably because hertz wanted to incorporate a bunch of legacy systems but also have ecomm capabilities like renting on the app, credit card processing, etc.
With the added benefit of outsourcing all of this functionality (because why would a car rental company in 2019 which relies on online customers have a digital/webapps department!???)
And then I'm sure Hertz kept changing the requirements. If anything Accenture probably low-balled the initial bid, found out they couldn't do half of what hertz wanted, and just kept stringing them along until Hertz cancelled the contract.
Re:how!?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Worth remembering is you're hearing one side of the story here. Accenture isn't some small run of the mill corner shop. I have no doubt they could meet requirements if they were sanely managed. It is a unfortunate reality that consultants and services companies get bad names often because their customers either don't know what they want, or are poor at managing their own requirements.
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Yes we are only hearing one side of the story but the requirement itself isn’t a surprise for anyone designing a website. Having dealt with companies like Accenture, they can make complex projects exceedingly more difficult than they had to be. Part of it is the tendency of consulting firms to use the least experienced people who are learning on the job. A complex project like this requires good management on both sides to insure everything meets goals and milestones.
What we do know is that website is
Re:how!?!? (Score:5, Informative)
A) Easy.
Step 1) You fill roomfuls of people billing $175 to $225 per hour (who also have travel expenses) for at least a year to gather a requirements document and prepare a Statement of Work. You run it past legal and sign contracts that make it easy to blame failure on the customer.
Step 2) You take the giant disorganized mess of conflicting requirements, and send it offshore with the cheapest developers with no experience. You use one of the buzzword project management models such as Scrum or Agile to keep up appearances of progress.
Step 3) You then begin to test only to realize the customer doesn't like what you have built. You blame the customer for not making all the requirements clear and loop back to Step 1 until you run out of money, patience or both.
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How did you get hold of Accenture's confidential business model document? You missed out step 4 tho...
4) If the customer accepts the system despite its failings and lack of features, and then reports critical, high impact, bugs that should be fixed under warranty, charge for analysing the issue and declaring that the system is working as designed.
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Step 0) Blowjobs for the 'decision makers'.
And hookers and blackjack
Re:how!?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I wasn't really targeting Accenture by the way, there are some off-shore consulting firms that are even worse in my experience. They lure these poor suckers into a contract with $30 per hour developer rates, and then turn 8 hour fixes into 240 hour projects.
Re:I don't get this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't get this (Score:5, Insightful)
There are literally 7 or 8 things you have to take care of, rather than two or three.
7 or 8? LOL. There are hundreds of things and thousands of interfaces to take care of. This kind of system is very complicated. Accenture obviously underbid it, then tried to slop together something that they could use as a cash cow for years by getting support and upgrade contracts.
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Accenture obviously underbid it, then tried to slop together something that they could use as a cash cow for years by getting support and upgrade contracts.
So situation normal. With most big consultancies, failure is the ONLY option. They don't get swept away by leaner and meaner companies that can actually do the job because they routinely under-bid and over-promise, then use their large legal department to smooth things over much in the way the Mob used to smooth things over (only using motions in court rather than lead).
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Excuse me, but if you can't get this running for $32 million dollars, then you are in the wrong business. It's not THAT complicated. They clearly "overmanaged" it. It's the consultant way: Abstractions all the way down. They've spent millions before anyone even touches code that isn't just a translation layer but actually does something.
Re:I don't get this (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse me, but if you can't get this running for $32 million dollars, then you are in the wrong business.
A surfeit of money makes software projects harder, not easier.
It means more overhead, more managers interfering, more layers of bureaucracy and more meetings. Communication problems go up as the square of the team size, politics trumps expertise, and decision making and blame get shifted around inexorably.
Fred Brooks observed 45 years ago that Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later [wikipedia.org].
If you want something done properly and quickly:
1. Use your own employees, so they have skin in the game.
2. Use a team that has worked together successfully in the past.
3. Starve them of resources, so they have no choice but to create a lean efficient solution.
4. Leave them alone, so they can get the job done.
This is the exact opposite of what Hertz did.
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Hence every generation of software developers (+managers) keeps repeating the same mistakes.
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Excuse me, but if you can't get this running for $32 million dollars, then you are in the wrong business
$32M is a small down payment for a system like this. The last one I worked on, our dimwit executive vice-president brought in a Big Consultancy company that charged us $100M for their software products before a line of code was written, and the products they sold us were a total misfit for the application. But it was what they had so it's what they sold us. The only good part of that project was that after it was cancelled the VP was canned (albeit it with a $2M severance package).
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This is _exactly_ what I expect from Accenture. Expensive failure.
Is this the first time you've heard of them?
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Say 3 dozen divided into 32 million.
That $888.888.89 per feature. Assuming the complexity of each feature follows a Pareto distribution, you can focus a few people on the top three and have an intern write the rest.
I've written PoS and back end systems for a combined brick-and-motar, online retail and wholesale business. Not trivial, mostly when it came to accepting payment and tying the transaction to the stock system - but not hard like say, designing a CPU is, or getting cryptography right is. Multiplyi
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Sort of. According to TFA, it was in the contract that the code should be organized in a manner that makes it plausible to extend it to support sibling companies to Hertz, both within the US and in Europe.
So that stuff you mentioned, used wisely, is a good idea.
I have heard the story a few times: "Oh, we dug into that legacy code and it has classes that inherit tons of stuff, and even subclasses of subclasses. And there are logic trees that depend on type buried all over the place."
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So that stuff you mentioned, used wisely, is a good idea.
There's nothing worse than "enterprise code". To start with, the larger your codebase, the less you should be using third-party frameworks to get started fast but add clutter and maintenance difficultly. In any case there's simply no excuse for a controllerFactoryFactoryFactory in any codebase. It's not "enterprise code" without factoryFactoryFactories!
Of course, Hertz also wouldn't want their code to bee too Enterprisey any more than they'd want it to be too Avisey.
Re: Another failed Java project (Score:2)
All they asked for was the software to be Object Oriented programming friendly so that they wouldn't have to rewrite say a search results list.
What's baffling is they used Angular which pretty much forces at least the front end code to be OO. I'm not sure how they even managed to fail that task unless they simply refused to break up code into modules and just programmed everything in one monolithic piece of Angular.
It's a good thing they put that in the contract because I would almost expect a code base of
Re:$32 million? (Score:4, Interesting)
What do you expect from a company spun off from Enron's accountant.
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Hertz or Accenture? There's a general rule about consultants. If they can't deliver on time and only slightly over budget, there's a good chance it was you yourself which screwed up from the very beginning.