FDE Times: When the client already hired Accenture or Deloitte — the FDE owns “done”
A 6 November FDE Times guide says vendor FDEs increasingly sit beside SI teams (OpenAI with Accenture/Capgemini; Deloitte putting FDEs into delivery): SIs are scored on SOW scope, FDEs on production outcomes — so lead with an eval-based acceptance suite, a one-owner responsibility matrix, and a handover rehearsed with the SI engineers.
FDE Times’s 6 November guide opens on a familiar kickoff: you are not the only technical team in the room — Accenture, Deloitte or another systems integrator already has a signed SOW. OpenAI’s Frontier partners and Accenture–Palantir joint work make that setup common, not exceptional.
The fragile point is the definition of “done”. Consultancies are judged against fixed scope and utilisation; FDEs are done when the business outcome runs in production. A worked claims-agent example shows 20/20 UAT can pass while a 200-claim eval hits only 85% against a 95% business bar — contract finished, outcome not.
The guide’s fix is leadership, not rivalry: one primary owner per row in a responsibility matrix, an eval suite the SI runs in CI as shared acceptance, weekly platform briefings, and a runbook rehearsed with SI engineers observing. Credit their integration work, own the agent gap, and propose the shared mechanism instead of blaming anyone.
Source: fdetimes.net