Pros
Health Benefits Sales and delivery staff are, for the most part, incredibly fun to work with. I personally enjoyed the autonomy, but you can easily be forgotten about if you don't self-promote. The company consistently hits its crazy growth numbers. The leadership has a great global formula for doing that. Accenture is taking over the business which can be a pro and a con. My personal experience is that working with Accenture at the customer level was fantastic. Highly professional and very smart. They didn't push me around as many people might assume.
Cons
Nobody comes to the office anymore like they did in the first 5 years of the company. This means there is no culture for new people in Chicago. There was a reorg recently which may have changed this, but the delivery model meant people could get staffed anywhere. There was no mechanism for the regional GMs to keep their folks on local projects. Again, may be changing which would be a huge improvement. The company is largely made up of people who've been there 8+ years and people with 2 years or less tenure. The issue is that it is about who you know and how well you get informal sponsorship. You have to know the folks in middle-to-senior positions who have been there for a while. That makes it incredibly hard for new people to get recognized if you didn't have that "amazing" project. Still did stack ranking when I was there. HR has become less personable and now "all business". It's sad because they are great people on a personal level. Now they are basically robots carrying out orders. Sigh. Everybody just got silly new titles. Avanade is notorious for creating inflated and confusing titles that are ultimately meaningless to the customer. It's embarrassing to introduce yourself to the customer.
