Comment by paranoidrobot

As far as I can tell, this sort of over-promise, under-deliver, bill-huge thing is pretty normal for these massive consulting companies.

Their big name experts come in, tell you how you're doing it all wrong and they have the best solution around for only $X million and they can deliver in 12 months. Management nods, gives the greenlight, tells you to cooperate fully with them.

Their layers of consultants then tie up a ton of your time/resources over the next 12 months figuring out what they actually should be doing, and why what the Expert said only has a passing resemblence to what's actually needed. So there's then rounds of discussion on how this and that change will be a variance, all billable extras.

After the 12 months is up, nothing is delivered in a workable state, it gets rejected, sent back for changes. This is all more billable variances, because of course it was delivered to the approved spec, and if you squint, and really push the definitions of words then it might vaguely resemble what it is that the spec said.

I've seen this play out multiple times.

The only surprising thing here (to me) is that Hertz pulled the plug while their spend was only $32M. Well done Hertz.

I can only hope that someone learned their lesson to stop using consulting groups for this kind of thing. I won't be holding my breath on that one, though.