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How to get into IBM ISL from GBS
Hi all,
I have a offer from Perficient and joining in 2 months time. Question :
1: how is the company in terms of job security and projects? I work with web analytics
2: How is the hike and work life balance.
3: Attrition rate
4: Hike is good but will it be a safer vet like Accenture Operations?
Need some views from people working there.
Thanks in advance.
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Here is a long-winded, but also somewhat concise explanation of the Rube Goldberg machine that funnels down to getting yelled about hours and timesheets:
At the more most senior level, Many of them have a limited requirement of billable hours, as a portion of their time is meant to run the business operations of the internal side day to day.
The scrutiny comes because that was how much they agreed upon for annual scope of work with clients, and the extra hours that cause overages, create a world of new problems and weeks of discussion to try to correct or reallocate (taking hours from other jobs) for and the client who made the PO/SOW, do not give one solid F*** and will just take the business away if seen as “too expensive” as we compete with AI and small production shops that are turn key.
The yelling of time sheets is because they are held to the network who only sees the bottom line and if not meeting forecasts for the month, come down on everyone below in a pyramid. Because if they
Fun fact- once upon a time companies used blended rates, which incentivized hiring more junior and mid levels (because the company made more off their hours below the blended rate benchmark), and then managers could manage. It also allowed for bigger teams with more manageable workloads and delegation. It also created larger margins that allowed for better employee compensation.
Then, the entire industry as a whole, changed to the rate card (a house of cards model that felt smart at the beginning). So the incentive changed, because that meant everyone billed to their specific level rate, so keeping everyone capped below their individual level margins based on client negotiated rates was how you achieve those margins. It also meant less staff, and less delegation, and tighter teams, and more senior level billing who have exceptionally wider margins because of their rates.
So now most companies are top heavy. And most of the current seniors that are in the elder millennial age range, are working excessively. For example, I’m a rung below, and the perfect age in my career where I’m working an insane amount of hours and have no time to mange my team which is excessively small compared to our workload, and have already hit 100% of my billable hours for the year, so now I’m just pure profit for the company through the end with no guarantee of additional compensation.
So, your billable hours are a domino that causes problems on the annual budget level, which causes problems with client relationships. The timesheets is because we all serve the network overlords and their mandates to meeting time-based forecasts that don’t account for dynamic business changes; and of course, for public companies, the shareholders and board of directors watching the stock prices.
Rate cards are negotiated between a client and an agency in a master services agreement - it's not an agency-wide billing model. A single agency can have rate card based billing for one client with blended rate billing on another and project based fixed fee on a third.
With that being the case it makes structuring a large agency tough. Every client wants to have "senior people" working on their business. In a rate card model that benefits the agency because they can be billed out at a higher rate, but if you have blended rate accounts those same senior people might be shared on, it hurts that side of the business because people with higher titles get paid better, so it negatively impacts margins.
1) leadership time to major clients is usually in the budget and it’s usually a quick review not hours upon hours
2) most senior leadership time is spent on new biz, internal initiatives, budget meetings, etc
3) most senior leadership don’t fill out their own time sheets.
I think the blended rate thing is client by client.
And they’re always getting after us for getting our timesheets in but they never do
Sr leader time is usually falls under new biz or “general” time. They aren’t allocating 3% or one brand, 5% to another etc.
This has definitely not been my experience at least at holding companies. Expectations for % billability are lower but drop below~ 60% and expect to start getting nasty comments from finance. Maybe different in small independent shops, but my guess is that senior leaders are actually doing more of the day to day there since teams are smaller.