Hertz sues Accenture for screwing up $32 million website redesign project

What do you get when you pay a global management consulting firm $32 million to redesign your website? Not a website that works, of course, but something much more interesting: an energetic finger-pointing performance complete with excuses, scapegoats, and bleating sacrificial lambs. At least that's what Hertz is claiming happened when it hired Accenture to redesign its website and is now suing Accenture for failure to deliver.

From The Register:

Among the most mind-boggling allegations in Hertz's filed complaint is that Accenture didn't incorporate a responsive design, in which webpages automatically resize to accommodate the visitor's screen size whether they are using a phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop.

That has been standard website practice for years and was even included in the contract that was signed, but the boffins at Accenture decided that only desktop and mobile versions were needed, according to Hertz. When the rental giant's execs asked where the tablet version was, Accenture "demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional fees to deliver the promised medium-sized layout."

It actually gets worse.

The specs called for a common core of libraries to be "a fundamental principle of the design" so that the company could share information and structures across all its companies' websites and apps. And Accenture, well, completely ignored that, according to Hertz.

"Accenture deliberately disregarded the extensibility requirement and wrote the code so that it was specific to the Hertz brand in North America and could not be used for the Hertz global brand or for the Dollar and Thrifty brands," the lawsuit alleged.

Accenture told The Register that Hertz's lawsuit is "without merit."

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