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Accenture is a leading global consulting, technology, and outsourcing company. It has clients and its own operations throughout the world. This case describes the human resources and related activities necessary to deliver its services to clients. It allows students to explore how Accenture predicts its staffing needs, identifies the necessary skills, identifies how to recruit staff, when to hire them, in what parts of the world, how to develop, compensate, and motivate them, how to form them into project teams, and manage the process in a cost effective manner. The case also provides a fictional example of an Accenture project. A potential client has issued a request for proposals to deliver a technology project. Students are asked to create a project team with the right mix of people at a cost that is competitive enough to win the project.

In spring 2015, Dollar General's CEO Rick Dreiling was looking ahead to retiring at year's end but worried about ensuring continued growth for the company he had built since 2008 into a market leader in the U.S. discount retail world. Dollar General operated over 11,500 stores in 40 states at the start of 2015, but had recently been rebuffed in a tender offer for its leading rival, Family Dollar. Though Dollar General had held talks with Family Dollar as early as 2013, Family Dollar shareholders chose to ignore Dollar General's more lucrative tender offer and the urging of several activist investors and sold their firm to the smaller Dollar Tree chain. Dreiling could not help but revisit some of the key decisions he and the rest of the board had made in their pursuit of Family Dollar. From a governance perspective, he was confident that the Dollar General board had fulfilled its duty to shareholders during the bidding process despite Family Dollar's decision to sell to Dollar Tree. From a strategic perspective, he wondered whether Family Dollar had been the right competitor to buy.