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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. |