Many, at least in the Contract Management Services part of the company. Contract Management is a very unorganized part of the company. I worked in CMAS, which was a support group to assist contract management. Consistently poor record keeping and document storage and retrieval was a nightmare, even though this is something Accenture does for clients.
Workload was tough. It wasn’t bad when I first started but they laid off half of my team and forced the work onto everyone else. As my career lengthened I found the tasks of myself and coworkers to be increasing dramatically. Due to position the cuts, we were essentially doing the jobs of 3 people each. The atmosphere was very aggressive and cut throat when it came to work deadlines and tasks to be performed. If you made a mistake you are better off playing ignorant or pushing the blame on someone else. You will fail here if you are the kind of person who takes personal accountability with the desire to learn from your mistakes and improve. It’s better to not make any mistakes at all, you will pay for them. I learned slowly, but towards the end of my employment I started keeping detailed logs of my activities and requests that came though me to avoid being thrown under the bus by others. It worked, but I did this too late.
Was laid off. After a year and a half with the company Contract Management laid off approximately 40 people due to unforeseen budget problems in 2014. Two weeks before that happened I had received a raise and a bonus for excellent performance, which tells me they had no idea what they were doing. When I was let go, my supervisor and career counselor weren’t even notified that I had been terminated and had 1 month to find new work outside of the company. After being laid off, they hired a temp to take over my position. Accenture did pay well when I first came into the company, I guess they’ve decided to cut back on that and hire cheaper and more easily disposable workforce.
Shady conditions for the layoff. A month and a half before the layoff I was notified by my supervisor verbally that I was going on a performance improvement plan (PIP) for poor performance in specific areas. The PIP was never formalized, never had an official review meeting nor did I receive or sign any documents to formalize the PIP. For 45 very stressful days after that I addressed all of the issues my supervisor had received positive recognition from her that I had fully addressed the problems she was having and thanked me putting the hard work in to improve the situaton. I assumed that maybe she didn’t formalize the PIP and was just using it to scare me in the beginning. I believed this because I got a raise two weeks before I was laid off and was told I was performing very well. I also wasn’t expecting the raise because I was a temp to hire recently converted / hired by Accenture full time and was not eligible for bonus or raise till the next year, so it was a surprise. At the end of the 45 days I thought I was in the clear and was starting to have a positive relationship again with my supervisor but then was laid off with no advance notice. I was invited to shady and unannounced performance review meeting with a Director I have little contact with on Friday. There wasn’t even a calendar invite and was notified that he would only need 15minutes of my time, 15minutes for a performance review meeting is un heard of. When I got the meeting they cut to the chase and told me I had a month to find new employment and the reason my position is being eliminated is not due to performance in anyway and was due to unforeseen shortfalls in the upcoming 2014 year.
While I can only speculate, my guess is Contract Management wanted to make a major cut to the workforce and was looking to remove anyone who either made too much or was in the lower performance bracket. If they really had budget problems they would not have given me a raise just two weeks before that.
What I learned from Accenture Contract Management is that they are a very cut throat part of the company, at least the Accenture Federal portion of the company. They don’t utilize their own solutions they are selling to clients, they over work their staff and instead of working with under performers they eliminate them. I worked very hard for Accenture and despite the problems I was having at the end I had done great work for the company and had invested much of my personal time and life to help make the company successful. At the end of the day, the company did not have the same commitment to me and to many others.
If you want a company to grow and learn, don’t work here. If you are an established contract management professional working towards the end game of your career, this may be the place for you. Be advised though, my original boss from when I first started was also let go in an odd way. She had built the CMAS Support team to Contract Management and worked very hard and loved by everyone. She was forced to resign in the middle of a vacation she was on just three months before the big layoff. The hiring/firing practices of this company are shameful.
