Wedsite redesign goes bad

Consultancy 43LL !

[tangor]

Car rental giant Hertz is suing over a website redesign from hell.

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.

[theregister.co.uk...]

I know all of us have experienced hired stuff go south from time to time, but this cautionary tale deals with immense dollars and large players who should have known better. Now a lawsuit (wherein the lawyers will get rich) has been filed. Bring popcorn!

One has to wonder why the party contracting for this work spent $32M (as in MEEELLLLION!) and got bupkis before severing the relationship and then suing to recover all monies AND damages!

Whew!

[Mark_A]

Reading the Register's article it seems Hertz have a good case.

[graeme_p]

Large players rarely seem to actually know better. I used to think I came across so much bad code done by previous developers because my clients are all SMEs, and mostly towards the small end, but it looks like I was wrong.

Accenture's failings are not limited to web stuff either: They (together with Microsoft) made a mess of the London Stock Exchange's trading system. After that they bought the company I used to work for to bring critical systems in house.

[iamlost]

They cost the most so they must be the best...
Or, just because they've been publicly messing up elsewhere for years is no reason to think we'll have a problem...

Whenever I see an Accenture news story I immediately get out the popcorn because it's never good; sort of like in those horror movies where the audience shouts 'don't wander alone, stupid' or 'no, no, don't go down there'. Everyone, except the clueless protagonist, can see the coming disaster. I've lost count but this is at least number 10 or 12 I've 'enjoyed' and far from the most expensive.

Accenture aside, an outside consultant can be awesome for RFQ/RFP, not so much for actual build and maintain.

[graeme_p]

That reminds me of this: [bbc.co.uk...]

That site is now thankfully scrapped. It was just a moderate size content site. The content was very good but a lot of it already existed and had to by put on the web rather than written from scratch. The content was excellent but there is no way it should have cost £35m annually or anything near that.

[JS_Harris]

Yikes, did they really spend 32 million for a website revamp?

Most of us old foggies here will be ranking circles around them on our self-built sites, money doesn't buy quality.

The lesson here is, in my opinion, pay for performance. An hourly wage with objectives and timelines and a nice fat bonus if the final objective(improved conversions) is reached is the way to go. 32 mil.... ouch!

[tangor]

Commonsense? Man on the ground.
Corporatesense? Designing Elephants from a Mouse Committee.

[ken_b]

Just 32 million? Amateurs!

My state just announced they want to abandon the system for licensing and registering vehicles after spending a $100 million +/_. or so and a few years building it in-house and apparently with a lot of out-sourced (contract) help. The "good news" about this mess is that this system actually works some of the time now.

They plan to replace this disaster with some commercial software for a mere $78 million.

And that's a happy bi-partisan idea .... ain't life fun?