| Interesting article.
A lot of negative things here said about such consultancy firms. Some positive things must also be said: - Outsourcing IT problems is hard. It requires knowledge/skill. Outsourcing to a big firm is a relatively safe bet. - The consultancy firm then again outsourcing it to cheaper contractors again is not per definition bad. It actually improves the mechanics of capitalism. Also nothing stops the customer from outsourcing their project to a cheaper contractor themselves and cutting out the middleman (Accenture). But they don't want to carry that risk. Accenture can carry that risk. - Big consultancy firms build up a load of experience, connections and assets for dealing with specific problems. They can re-use solutions in a way that your typical middle-sized software team can never do. I have worked myself at a much smaller consultancy company more or less copycatting accenture (founders were ex-accenture employees). I moved on because I no longer liked the job and am now working in a more regular software dev company. What I noticed is that: - The ex-accenture managers knew better what had priority and were sharper challenging time estimates or refactoring initiated by dev-teams. Not always good for the dev-team, but often good for the project actually. (Bummer: dev-teams can be wrong often). Management often challenged dev-teams to whiteboard their solution. The manager put in the extra effort to understand this and if he still didnot understand the benefit then a refactoring was not done. (Yes this can be both good and bad depending on the technical level of your manager, see also my next bullet) - Anything more complex they would often simplify too much. Projects that exceeded expectations in complexity often failed. I expect this also to be the reason for all these failed projects for Accenture. If a problem doesnot fit in one of their standard slideshows then they lack the expertise to overcome this. -Sale-teams usually over-promise (often under pressure or flawed reward systems) and are totally not focusing on if the developers actually have the expertise to pull it off. - They also used more corporate flavored powertools (like Salesforce or ServiceNow). The average dev stays far away from those and prefers open source. Anyway, they would implement in weeks what takes several months to build in Django + React (or any other open-source combo). - They could leverage very average engineers to deliver quality work. As long as it was a commodity job. |