You'll start with competent consultants; they will slowly rotate in new consultants with less competency for as long as you let them, until they are all useless at anything other than talking confidently.
You've worked for companies with halfway decent management. Unfortunately, that's not universal.
Think about if from the perspective of the consulting firm. They are charging $X per hour and paying their staff $Y per hour. Profit is $X-$Y, and their incentive is to maximize the delta. If you let them continue to increase the delta, why wouldn't they?
The other two posters perfectly describe the Accenture experience (terrible) so I am curious.
My direct experience is that they send high quality technical architects to get the deal done and the moment that happens those architects vanish and they back up the school bus and send in an army of zero competence low experience drones who are barely functional.
And that’s a good outcome compared to the offshore variant.
My direct experience is that they send high quality technical architects to get the deal done and the moment that happens those architects vanish and they back up the school bus and send in an army of zero competence low experience drones who are barely functional.
This is also my experience. Accenture was given several high value projects, and their technical architects made it seem like they had the knowledge and skills to deliver. When I spoke to one of the in-house engineers a few months later, he said the consultants had yet to deliver anything of value, and the on-going planning made it seem like the team from Accenture actually doing the work didn't even fully understand the project.
On my own project, the Accenture team took nearly an entire program increment to deliver a clearly dysfunctional plan for implementing a progressive web app based on one of our products. They submitted an MR for the plan, and after the number of review comments reached 50, they just moved on to other things.
I am sure there are some good consultants at Accenture. I just haven't worked with them.
I’ve worked with consultants from Accenture a few times. All seemed technically competent and excelled in their roles.