Surrey Research Park is a nice environment to work in with grass, trees and lakes, but let down by having only one road entrance/exit to the park, so if arriving by car be prepared for an extra 90 mins on your travel time EVERY day, and YES, it’s that bad, and arrive early due to the lack of parking.
I was involved with both Hardware and Software testing; the hardware development and testing team were a fantastic team, but everything is pretty much left to the last six weeks of the calendar year, rather than being organised and managed throughout the year. On top of that during this very busy period all staff are expected to complete yearly reviews, gathering 360 feedback and WRF’s etc from colleagues rather than leaving it to the quieter period at the start of a new year.
When the company was in trouble during the ‘first restructure’ (round of redundancies), I was asked to move over to Software testing (as qualified in both areas). In this area there are some talented staff and some interesting projects but drastically let down my management not understanding the customer requirements, then trying to do things on the cheap by refactoring existing software. This ends up wasting more time/money and the talent of the staff trying to sort projects out, this in turn leaves the company losing money year after year. Even after having lessons learned retrospectives projects do not improve.
After trimming down the company, the company over the next two years constantly took on new staff on monthly intakes, with quite a high proportion ending on the bench because the company did not win the expected business. Then after being reassured there would be no more restructuring
there was an enouncement of a second restructure/redundancies. On that very day there were 20 + new starters sitting in the Atrium!!!!!!
They have now scrapped the software test practice leaving the company directionless on ensuring the products meet the project requirements and high quality the customers expect.
We were told that unless you could find a project to work on with at least 1-year funding, you were redundant, this has in effect turned all of the full time staff into contractors.
My multi skilled flexibility to move between hardware and software was rewarded (Stabbed in the back) with redundancy - the company works on its own one-way flexibility policy.
They’ve now just closed another building SRP3 after having to twice restructure the company, that is left being financially supported by BAE Systems Group, no one in the company can understand why Julian Cracknell has been left in charge of the business.
It’s a very great shame the way its managed, so if you want to work somewhere that is contracting, losing money, with redundancies every 2 years, with a Senior Management and HR team that are not bothered about the staff (just treated as a number) this is the place for you….
