Comment by laxmis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laxmis | Hacker News Reader

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An amusing description. As an ex Accenture person, I would say that the company develops and implements tons of critical business systems for its customers. One reason Accenture used to get a lot of flak from the tech side of any of their customers, is that they were traditionally close to the business users and execs in the customer organization. That gave them sufficient insurance in the event of failed projects unless these ended up in court.

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.

So you saw a project that was on time, on budget, and viewed as a success by the client (not spun to be a success, but actually unreservedly a success)? Because I never have from projects driven by consultants, and while the plural of anecdote is not data, I literally have never seen anyone speak of outside consultants delivering except from very boutique consultancies.

The nature of almost all complex projects, whether in house or out are that they are under scoped to get approval and then run over budget and over time to get additional resources.

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.

I've seen plenty of in house projects of reasonable size and scope succeed (on time, on budget, users happy). I've yet to see comparably sized projects by consultancies succeed.

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.

Accomplishing hard things internally is one problem: accomplishing the hard thing.

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 hear you, and agree with you, except I've worked at multiple non-tech companies that still had better people than the consultants that were brought in.

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.

By that definition, many places don't have internal software teams.

Yep. Show me an org with a software group that is a part of IT, subject to IT bureaucracy, and I'll show you a software group that delivers software no one wants once a quarter (or something equally as ludicrous).

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.

I think of it as people-inertia too.

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.

Right, and the aggregate affect it has on individuals, and that creation of a feedback loop, is useful to understand for why the culture won't change. I'm just listing out how the initial expectations and organizational incentives in IT tend to run counter to what is needed in software. IT you don't -want- agility, and so you purposely structure your org to make change as difficult as possible. Software development that gets structured that way tends to be developed very, very slowly, and with no real user feedback. IT basically mandates waterfall approaches, decision by committee, and dilution of responsibility.

I'd also add doing not only the hard thing, but also the non-sexy thing.

In house there's less incentive to underbid and overpromise

I wrote something along these lines here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23868839 (I quote below). Accenture tends to secure projects that are a little bit hand wavy in terms of requirements, because, as others have said, they are very close to the executives and are able to cater to what they expect. The comment:

> 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.

Check out this post by Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz fame on the topic, where he advocates for hiring consultancies https://sparktoro.com/blog/why-you-should-hire-agencies-cons...

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.

“fame”

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