I spent a number of years working as an employee of one of the big IT outsourcers on a Australian government department (better not say which one) contract. During this time I was required to assist a team from Accenture who had won a contract to write some software that needed to be integrated with a number of systems.
Accenture had "all their best people" on the job. This meant almost an entire floor of staff; managers, project managers, BAs, god knows what else. Oh, they also had two young devs, you know, to actually do the work. These two guys were nice, seemed pretty smart, but fresh out of uni had no experience at all and were just so far out of their depth it was embracing. I tried to help them where I could, but didn't get much opportunity.
Accenture originally gave a timeframe of three years for this project, but when I left they were two years in and still not even a working demo in sight. I have no idea if it was ever completed or what happened
> Accenture had "all their best people" on the job. This meant almost an entire floor of staff; managers, project managers, BAs, god knows what else. Oh, they also had two young devs, you know, to actually do the work.
As a dev/architect in Professional Services (not at a big 5 consulting firm), this is way off the mark. PMs and BAs do a ton of work that I either would not want to do or am not good at and while the end product is a bundle of code there is a LOT of work that goes into building it outside of straight development.
I tend to write in a hyperbolic way to accentuate the point I'm trying to make. Obviously the BAs et al do a lot of work, but I was trying to contrast the number of non-developers to developers (yes, there were only 2).
I should note that my opinion of BAs is not very high, based solely on the dozen or so I've had to work with. The job sounds worthwhile, and I'm sure there's excellent BAs out there, but the company I used to work for didn't employ any of them (or perhaps the culture was such that the good ones left)
I totally agree that non-coders contribute mightily to a project...especially good BAs. However, if there were really only two developers (which is admittedly unclear from the description) then it sounds like the staffing was absurdly out of whack. Unless this is a tiny floor and we're talking one PM and BA for the two devs....
Accenture had "all their best people" on the job. This meant almost an entire floor of staff; managers, project managers, BAs, god knows what else. Oh, they also had two young devs, you know, to actually do the work. These two guys were nice, seemed pretty smart, but fresh out of uni had no experience at all and were just so far out of their depth it was embracing. I tried to help them where I could, but didn't get much opportunity.
Accenture originally gave a timeframe of three years for this project, but when I left they were two years in and still not even a working demo in sight. I have no idea if it was ever completed or what happened