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Accenture is primarily a PowerPoint consulting firm. Many companies around the world desperately need PowerPoints from external consultancies to help them plan
by king_magic 5y ago
Accenture is primarily a PowerPoint consulting firm. Many companies around the world desperately need PowerPoints from external consultancies to help them plan out their innovation roadmaps, apparently. They pay a huge premium for expensive local consultants to create these PowerPoints, because Accenture uses big, bold colorful fonts in their presentations, and Accenture's clients simply don't have the necessary expertise to use these fonts.
Also, occasionally, there is some actual dev/implementation work that accompanies the PowerPoints. This work is carried out, poorly, by offshore resources who are certified in as many certifications as possible. Certifications are extremely important for them, because otherwise, when these resources are on the bench, they'd have nothing else to do.
Oh, also, Blockchain. And AI. These are important concepts for Accenture, and it's totally okay if clients pay millions of dollars for blockchain/AI solutions that massively disappoint, because innovation.
Source: worked at a subsidiary of ACN for a few years, interacted with the ACN folks quite a bit, and while my description above is obviously snarky/sarcastic, it surprisingly isn't really that far from the truth.
In summation, I have absolutely no idea why Accenture is worth $140B.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 988747 5y agoYou are spot on with "work carried out poorly by offshore resources". My current company made a business model from taking over projects that Accenture screwed up, and doing them properly. And boy, there is no shortage of such projects :)
- murph-almighty 5y agoIf only you could get the projects _prior_ to Accenture screwing them up. Just eliminate the middleman, yaknow?
- xwolfi 5y agoIt's impossible, there are layers and layers of management that need to see Accenture fails before trying a more rational alternative. I'm not sure why, but we have consultants explaining us how an if/else business workflow is in fact an "AI robot employee" that we even need to give a human name to, before we switch to normal/cheaper if/else-enabled languages, once it fails to do if/else properly.
- sgt101 5y ago> I'm not sure why, but we have consultants explaining us how an if/else business workflow is in fact an "AI robot employee" that we even need to give a human name to, before we switch to normal/cheaper if/else-enabled languages, once it fails to do if/else properly. I will explain. MONEY.
- wayoutthere 5y agoThe reason Accenture is as successful as they are is because they have a top-notch sales engine. But it’s well known they’re just as full of BS as the big 4 consulting firms, except the big 4 have some niches that they’re really good in. As far as I can tell, Accenture is a consulting sales engine with an offshore body shop attached.
- ep103 5y agoThat is literally their purpose. Don't want to go through the hassle of offshoring your entire IT / enginering or other division, and will be gone before the inevitable rot and overages kick in? Accenture will happily do that for you, and figure out how to abuse the H1b program enough to fill as many bodies with offshore people in your onshore location as you need to justify your realestate purchase. I genuinely think accenture might be one of the most powerful companies in the world, just because of how many entire departments of so many major internaional corporations actually report to accenture management, not the parent company.
- wayoutthere 5y agoAccenture is just the one where the “white face” runs the show so they can charge higher bill rates. Companies HQed in India (TCS, Wipro, etc) just hire white people to talk to senior leaders (which is so common I have literally been called the “white face” multiple times as a Caucasian person delivering consulting services to enterprise IT orgs despite working for a company that only staffs on-shore).
- ep103 5y agoYeah, exactly. I was in that role, though it took me a few months to figure out that that's really what it was.
- vendiddy 5y agoDo you have any insight into how their sales engine works? I'm curious because it's a shame that projects go to companies like Accenture when are so many qualified teams out there.
- koonsolo 5y agoAt least they don't have to put any effort into setting customer expectations :D.
- rukuu001 5y agoThis is what Accenture is very good at - selling into large orgs.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoThat would involve attracting good developers though. Few companies manage to do that, especially if the job involves integrating ERP systems.
- wyclif 5y agoAnecdotal, and I avoid judging the merits of any company based on a single employee, but the only Accenture staff I know lives here in SE Asia and she's offshore labour. When I've talked to her, I found it interesting that she had great difficulty explaining what she does at Accenture. What I gather is that it does indeed involve a lot of PowerPoint slides, Excel spreadsheets, scheduling apps, and mostly "workflow" type productivity. I've never been able to find out if they actually make anything, but I suspect not.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIt honestly sounds like a lot of busywork and pretending to be busy. I was once in a bi-weekly sprint demo meeting (whole department). The team of consultants that were actually relocated to my country from India to keep a closer eye on them (iirc it was Infosys?) showed their work, and... it was a powerpoint presentation with a single slide with a single bullet point saying they think they found the source of a bug and will work on it next sprint.
- temp5565_65 5y agoAs ex-Accenture, I can totally believe you. I was once on a project where a guy took more than a month to deliver a codebase that was negative in value - we spent more dev time untangling and cleaning up the utter cr*p that he produced than it would have taken to scrap the whole thing and rewrite it from scratch.
- meepmorp 5y agoIf a single deli in New Jersey is worth $100m, $140B for Accidenture might be a bargain.
- Zealotux 5y agoA friend of mine was one of the early employees at a company that is essentially making PowerPoint presentations for Google, highly profitable business, I was amazed at the amount of employees they were able to support just by making PowerPoints for one company.
- ndm000 5y agoI think the sentiment here (and in many comments) is interesting - I've been a consultant for over a decade and felt the same thing in the early parts of my career. Those are really expensive Powerpoints! In the last few years I've created some of those Powerpoints, and have realized the value in them (not saying that all are valuable). I've been asked questions like: - We're a year in to a data warehouse migration and have nothing to show for it. What happened, where do we go from here, and how much will it cost? - We'd like to outsource a call center, but don't know where to start both on the tech and process sides. Can you help? - We have a business idea, but know little about technology. Can you put together a plan, so that we know how much we'll need to invest? Oh, and can you design the architecture and tell us which cloud to use? There's tons of rigorous analysis, interviews, and research that goes into answering these questions well enough that they can be trusted. Since it's primarily an exercise in critical thinking, mileage probably varies depending on who is doing the work. There are plenty of bad Powerpoints I've seen out there that don't move the needle or add anything new.
- ethbr0 5y agoPowerpoint gets derided by developers, because they think it's a deliverable. It's not. It's tool used to communicate a deliverable. The actual deliverable is knowledge of the processes, infrastructure, market, industry, options, etc. And an answer to an original question posed that required that knowledge. A good Powerpoint seems obvious -- because that's literally the definition of a good presentation of the above deliverable. If I clearly communicate my summarized facts to you, and then draw an obvious conclusion, does that not seem obvious? But that's forgetting that before the presentation, and before the research behind the presentation, none of those facts were known!
- afterburner 5y agoIt's a great way for management to cover their asses.
- seniorThrowaway 5y agoExactly. Management's job is to make decisions, and they outsource it to "consultants" to insulate themselves from blame. This is the true reason consulting firms exist and make so much money, this is the true service they provide.
- 88 5y agoNot defending Accenture here, but if you think management consulting is all about the PowerPoint slides you’re missing the point.
- andreilys 5y agoYou’re right, it’s primarily about providing CYA insurance to dysfunctional management teams that need a third party to tell them what they already know and provide cover for an unpopular decision.
- osrec 5y agoOr to blame failure on, last minute, for a project that is already nearing failure.
- king_magic 5y agoWho said anything about management consulting? I'm talking purely tech / "digital transformation". That said, my opinion of management consulting is similarly low.
- 88 5y agoIf you think tech / digital transformation consulting is all about the PowerPoint slides you’re missing the point.
- haswell 5y agoI agree with you, but you have not offered anything solid to back this position.
- kube-system 5y agoWhen I worked in consulting, the vast majority of my work was with companies that didn't have the staff and/or expertise to solve a particular problem. Then again, I didn't work at a big-four -- but I would imagine that a team that 25% has experience in doing a particular thing is still better than a team that has zero experience doing it. While people often criticize consulting companies for barely knowing what they're doing, the flip side of this is that the people at the company hiring them don't necessarily know what they're doing either :D There's a lot of people coasting along in corporate IT.
- fowkswe 5y agoIt's the economy of C players, AKA the Enterprise. There are hordes of bureaucrats spending other peoples money with reckless abandon. I once worked at a firm not unlike Accenture - essentially management consulting - and was on a project that ended up being a frontend reskin of a Fortune 500 company website. But at the project inception I was asked to scope the project and no one, either on our side, or the client side knew what the scope was. So I put line items in with pretty large time estimations as placeholders for the skinning their SaaS application as well as the website. The client glazed over the Gantt chart (created in MS Project) and signed off on it. In the end, we did design, frontend build and integration oversight on about 15 templates of their .com. This is the kind of thing any run of the mill digital agency could and would do for 50k. We charged them 2.1M. This kind of project (now with AI/ML/Blockchain!) is Accenture and the like's bread and butter.
- defen 5y agoWas there any sort of competitive bidding process? i.e. why did the Fortune 500 company choose your firm over others?
- SilurianWenlock 5y agoWho are the A and B players?
- dave1999x 5y agoPeople who recognise technology as core to their business.
- rchaud 5y agoYour "C Player" sounds like a dream client. Signs off on the contract and makes regular payments. Or would you prefer to work w/ a client that lowballs you on fees, promises that that the requirements are final, and then balks at paying more in order to complete the inevitable expansion of requirements?
- johncessna 5y agoThe US Federal government spends a lot of money on consulting. So do a lot of the fortune 500 companies.
- vanadium 5y agoI can’t thing of a tech market segment more in need of “disruption” by now, quite honestly.
- laxmis 5y agoAn 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.
- lostcolony 5y agoSo 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.
- scrollbar 5y agoCheck 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-consultants-for-everything-you-can/ 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.
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- lostcolony 5y agoMore than just Accenture. Exact same experience with BCG and McKinsey.
- eplanit 5y agoand IBM Global Services.
- sprkwd 5y agoDeloitte.
- not1ofU 5y agoI seen a post on linked in the other day, where an employee of McK was using thier own child (~8 Yrs) to virtusignal McK (child had drawn some picture with, I "heart" McKinsey). I immediatly wondered if the child was aware of this: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55939224 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55939224 While searching for this link, the next link google offered was this: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/how-we-help-clients/center-for-societal-benefit-through-healthcare/substance-use https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-s...
- Traubenfuchs 5y agoAlso, they sell mostly-local, well dressed body-shopping drones to local companies, e.g. in Germany, where many companies require the "consultants" (body-shopped implementation slaves) to speak German. Salary is mediocre but not super bad and you have a chance to work in top companies and huge projects.
- eplanit 5y agoThat's a _perfect_ description -- concise yet thorough, and very accurate (I've been a consultant for 23 years, and have worked on several projects with Accenture involved).
- pantulis 5y ago"Accenture is primarily a PowerPoint consulting firm" No, that would be McKinsey.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- perardi 5y agoThat is savage. And disturbingly accurate, as once you strip away the admittedly really quite nice typography from Accenture documents like this, you are left with just absolute pablum. https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/Thought-Leadership-Assets/PDF-2/Accenture-COVID-19-New-Human-Truths-That-Experiences-Need-To-Address.pdf50 https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/Thought-Leadership-Asset... (Edit: Wow, they apparently used the phrase “Thought Leadership” in this file name without irony.)
- pwned1 5y agoI've always wondered what type of person it takes to create a presentation like that. Do they actually believe in the things they are putting on the slides, or do they know this is all BS but they're willing to do such soulless work for whatever they're getting paid to do so?
- koonsolo 5y agoI once heard a salesguy say the following statement: "One of our customers accused me of selling them shit. But all we have is shit, so what do you expect?"
- mechEpleb 5y ago>hey intern, here's the topic, here's some buzzwords, here's the word and slide count, you have 3 hours
- perardi 5y agoSome of these are real howlers. “Broadband and 5G will be life-essential for most” Well no shit, Sherlock.
- waltherg 5y agoThere's usually entire teams involved in preparing these sorts of decks - from content researchers via subject matter experts to designers. So not a single person needs to believe in it all at once. I think a far better question is: Does whoever is paying for these decks to be prepared believe in them? These decks aren't (always) built for internal use.
- r366y6 5y agoI was software engineer at Accenture for 4 years and you literally made the best description I have ever heard of the company. And I want to add, forget any career progression if you want to stick with software development.
- mym1990 5y agoYou have no idea why Accenture is worth $140B because it seems like you have no idea what you're talking about in general. It would be a huge overstatement to say that the 500,000+ employees of Accenture are focused on creating PowerPoints(not that you would know how to do a simple task like that anyways). Most consulting companies go to where the new money is and usually that's in buzzword fields like 'Blockchain' and 'AI'...these are 'important concepts' for many businesses right now, even if almost none of those businesses can figure out wtf it means. But guess what, many companies have more cash on hand but don't want to grow headcount 'just because', so the more expensive but less risky solution is to hire outside work to take moonshots on some projects. If it works, great, if it doesn't, next. Congratulations on working for a subsidiary of ACN for a few years though, I am sure that was the peak of you career. I'm sure your 'interactions with the ACN folks' is a good representation of the 500,000 employees and business models of the company.
- CoastalCoder 5y agoAs I read the parent comment, I couldn't help but hearing it in Steve Burke's sarcastic-rant voice. Well done Steve, you've become iconic.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ramoz 5y agoYou're explaining your understanding of commercial consultancy, but are obviously (and you note at the end) not detailing your knowledge of systems integrators that don't always happen off-shore. For instance, many large companies in the valley have contracted engagements with Accenture as well as partnerships - especially Cloud. Any government work being done isn't offshore. https://www.thestreet.com/tech/news/accenture072020 https://www.thestreet.com/tech/news/accenture072020
- king_magic 5y agoYeah, I meant the whole thing to pretty much be tongue-in-cheek. That said, I'm very much aware of the onshore consulting that ACN does. And in my time in the ACN world, I was never once impressed with work ACN did - onshore or offshore.
- ramoz 5y agoI feel ya, and I work at ACN Fed :) The fluff is a thing... Luckily I get to lead a lot of what I do and in the applied intelligence organization where we're doing some interesting things as well as some fairly advanced engineering.
- jeswin 5y ago> In summation, I have absolutely no idea why Accenture is worth $140B. I'll tell you - because there are no alternatives. If you're a non-tech company (or the government), there is simply no way to hire the number of people needed for a large project. It's very, very difficult (if you aren't a software company) to build a team that's any better than what a consulting company will assemble for you. And besides, you might need them all only for a few years. That leaves the company (or govt) dependant on an IT services vendor. Now why Accenture? Scale. If you're the government (or Coca Cola), you can't risk going to a vendor who has a 1000 employees. There would just not be enough depth if something goes wrong, and they'll lack mature Business Continuity processes. That leaves you with big IT vendors with global prescence. Now, you could take a chance with a smaller vendor. But if anything went wrong, you're going to get fired for it. With Accenture, you are less likely to.
- Vadoff 5y agoFor a company with 1000 people, if even 100 of them are great engineers, they could easily complete any project Coca Cola would want in reasonable time.
- cjalmeida 5y agoIn a lot of cases they don’t just complete projects. They run entire departments.
- anitil 5y ago> if even 100 of them are great engineers What GP is getting at is that it's a big 'if'. How would you know? Every vendor under the sun is going to promise the world to you, how do vet them?
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI've never worked in any dev shop with a 100 engineers, let alone great ones; the actual amount of decent engineers is very small.
- swordsmith 5y ago> I'll tell you - because there are no alternatives. How about other more legit consulting firms like exponent (https://www.exponent.com/ https://www.exponent.com/)?
- whoknew1122 5y agoAnd by and large their tech 'talent' is absolutely devoid of talent. They generally have no idea what they're doing in the cloud.
- disabled 5y agoThis post is so thoughtful that I cannot do it justice. Creative consulting is also a scam and is often the opposite of creative. You ideally want these creative types in house to change things instead, because creative consulting really changes nothing. The promises of AI are also mostly a scam. The breakthroughs and discoveries made are often intellectually bankrupt. People drool from the correlations that are drawn from AI, even though there is no explanation for why this is occurring in real life. It is also making a lot of people’s jobs into “BS jobs”.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- itisit 5y agoIn my experience, 99.9% of the value in hiring a consultancy is to light a fire under the respective asses of one's employees.
- Demoneeri 5y agoIt's always funny to see Silly Valley people that think they are so cool while working on yet another app that show ads. Meanwhile at Accenture, I just delivered again another successful project with a real impact. When a very large organization across different regions were struggling to produce schedules for thousand workers with different skill sets, different union rules, night and day shifts, they came to see us. Now, everything is automated and the client saves months of work. I sleep better at night knowing that I helped those workers now get access to their scheduled weeks in advance through a portal instead of having surprise night shifts thrown at them. Maybe I should make another app that track people online?
- bitcharmer 5y agoI can't really say if you're sarcastic or not, but the GP is spot on even if snarky. I've worked for Accenture (for way too long) and they can be characterised by a single statement that they make to the client when all is said and done and the client complains about the steaming pile of shite that was delivered: "But in this signed contract here, there is no requirement that says our software should work". Come on, every serious software engineer knows they are full of it.
- munk-a 5y agoIt's such a ridiculously large organization that I think broad generalizations are going to necessarily fall short - I also have the general impression that Accenture is highly proficient at burning money but there've got to be a number of good departments and teams buried somewhere in there.
- Demoneeri 5y agoLike if an organization with >500 000 employees across the world is the same everywhere. You might have been working with incompetent people, but it's not my case. Successful projects are delivery every day. My worst experiences always come from working with Americans and I don't come to the conclusion that all Americans are incompetent.
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- eweise 5y agoTotally unfair characterization. I've seen them also produce word and excel docs.
- codingdave 5y agoSadly, the ex-Accenture people who get exec jobs in-industry didn't learn from the PowerPoint overkill, either. I work for a company completely run by ex-consultants. Who spend all their time sharing PowerPoint decks. The next layer or two or three of management spend all their time building those decks. We get called into meetings to talk about upcoming meetings, and asked to give the content for various slides in those decks. We recently had an influx of new leaders and now there is political infighting over whose format of decks and slides is the right one to use. I clearly am also being snarky/sarcastic. They do know more than this and they do more than this. But there is a some real truth to the matter, that consultants never quite lose that idea that their job is to do snazzy presentations, and that ends up getting more focus than delivering product.
- Rastonbury 5y agoThis is so wrong. The bulk of Accenture revenues don't come from PowerPoint consulting engagements (a typical strategy consulting trope), they have arms that compete with MBB and big for these engagements but these are like 500k-1m in size. The big money comes tech consulting and implementations, this is F500 companies upgrading SAP worldwide or and old non-tech company or government needing at app or moving infra to the cloud, now these engagements are 10-50m+. These are needed every 5-6 years when SAP or Oracle upgrades their ERP. The this is how Accenture is a 100bn company. They don't have the issues of the partnership structure other professional services companies have and are a shareholder darling.
- CRConrad 5y ago> they have arms that compete with MBB What, Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm?!? Is it warships or aeroplanes that Accenture builds nowadays?
- krasicki 5y agoAccenture is but one of many, already mentioned, such consulting firms. The particulars of their unique evolution are unimportant. They bill $43B per year so being "worth" $140B is essentially three years billing. Prospective buyers who want to sell their own by-products more exclusively (say, Oracle, Microsoft, Alphabet,...) look at the price tag as an opportunity to lock in big ticket clients for decades of migration, integration, and insider green-field, money-sink projects. Yes, consultancies like Accenture are copy-cat enterprises. A few decades ago they truly provided the brightest and the best of off-shore, inexpensive technical labor. But that changed with the H-1B tsunami that followed. The meme that America's social strengths could be used against it were not lost on these now global software powerhouses. Many of the initial H-1B waves of individuals worked their way into America's corporate C-Suites. The technical waves were followed by well-to-do, class entitlement waves of individuals who co-opted the POC cohort required to satisfy equal opportunity hiring laws. More recently, HR departments themselves have been out-sourced within the enterprises. The combination of the gutting of full-time technical staff AND the tight coupling of off-shoring to onshore expat cohorts completes the cycle of how Western enterprises were carved out of any capability to develop projects internally. They've been gutted. In America, citizen POC were left on the outside looking in (aaaaaaaand, here we are in social crisis) in addition to bearing witness to the soft takeover of the corporate management ranks. The Powerpoint slides are perfunctory. Our corporations are now as technically proficient as many dysfunctional outsourcing countries are at a functional level. The onshore benches represent the warehousing of local candidates to make way for politically and legally correct outsiders.
- deepanshuk 5y agoThe article like a good case study report tries to understand a subject and analyse it from various perspectives. it tries to answer some key questions 1) What does Accenture do ? 2) Is it really good at it ? 3) Does it know how to make money from its business model ? and I think the articles cover most of these points. And as for the Hertz example. So a big company is sued by someone for not doing what they promised ? Is that something surprising ? Is it something that only happens in consulting domain? The answer to the second and third questions are no. All the flag bearers of silicon valley have been sued from being in "villan" at some point. Like a successful business Accenture has nailed it core business model. From technology perspective sure the big picture looks bleak But it's not always dark "_Tech consulting definitely does have its bright spots. Accenture has smaller divisions like Accenture Interactive that work on pretty cool stuff, like a partnership with Disney on a new innovation lab and a collaboration with Apple on iOS business solutions. And if you’re a new college grad, associate positions can be fast ways to learn engineering on the job and get exposure to large scale systems that you wouldn’t otherwise work with._" From tech perspective it might seem like a shoddy company but we need to understand that it's not out there to make the best software for your needs it's their to make _a_ software for your needs one that just gets the work done. The clients which approach Accenture or for that matter any tech consulting company are out there to get their problems solved within a budget. To get a solution that just works And I don't believe every project of theirs is shitty.Because if quality was too much compromised then they would lose market value and there is no shortage of competition. While sales pitch is important for any business to work without successful projects a business cannot survive.They must have had success in the recent past that is why they are getting work. From a creative software engineers perspective its a Very shitty company because it doesn't care about the tech, But That's not its core business model ;to make great tech. The core model is to sell tech as a service to non tech companies. And make non tech companies harness tech for their needs. tech consulting should be treated as a different domain from technology. And in this domain some are good at it and some are shitty and then there is Accenture , somewhere in the middle. Ps: I'm not defending Accenture I just don't agree with all conclusions presented in the HN comments.
- danmur 5y agoThat's a bit unfair, they also do super shitty IT support and cloud service type stuff.