Capco Reviews

Cons

This holds true with all consulting firms, but since teams are dispersed across clients and locations it sometimes is difficult to come together as much as we would like. There is certainly effort made to do this through a variety of after hours events- social, family and philanthropic. The team looks forward to team wide get togethers as a reunion of sorts with people you don't see on your current project.

Cons

1) Rapid Growth (Cons) – The same rapid growth has caused CAPCO to take some hits in talent as recruitment tries to keep up with the demands of the business. I would imagine there are more promotions with this growth. However, we have hired at the senior levels quite a bit (a number of whom have not panned out and left). This is disappointing as it signals that the organization would prefer to gamble on someone we do not know well instead of promoting from within. That being said, this is an issue I’ve seen in every organization I’ve worked in. A good majority of junior resources have shown promise but there is a significant number with entitlement issues who believe the work assigned to them is beneath them or do not understand the nature of the consulting business.

2) Continuity in Promotion Requirements – There have been some missed promotions as well as weak promotions – again, this also exists everywhere. If you continue to work hard, you will receive the recognition, even if not immediately. One big concern on this is topic is when high performers who are missed are given reasons along the lines of “Hasn’t managed a large team/workstream”, “Hasn’t been at this level long enough” only to see someone else be promoted completely overlooking those same ‘requirements’. These should either be firmly established rules or never used as a reason someone was missed. This inconsistency will cause a loss in good talent.

3) Favouritism – All the talk of favouritism is the reason for this being on the CONS list. Favouritism exists in everywhere in life. Liking one thing doesn’t mean the dislike of other things. There is no “insiders” group that gets advantages, everyone has an equal opportunity to grow and strengthen their network within the firm. As you grow in any organization, you will have favourites that have helped you succeed and be a favourite of those you have helped succeed. The issue here is leadership in the intermediate-to-senior levels, not favouritism. If you have worked hard and helped your manager succeed, your manager needs to be your representative and lobbyist to their manager and so on upwards. This is how it happens in every organization. If you feel you have continuously been missed although you are a top performer, chances are your manager is not a good leader or you think you are a much higher performer than you actually are. There are avenues and methods to rectify both of these scenarios – whining about the success of others is not one of them. Doing so just shows that you are not ready to solve problems and drive the results you are looking for – you would rather anonymously complain that life is unfair.

4) Inappropriate Behaviour – I am surprised and annoyed that someone who claims to have been with CAPCO through so much of its success is willing to throw the entire organization in a bad light in a public from because of some individual people/situations they do not approve of. Even through the rapid growth, CATO has been able to maintain a ‘friends & family’ atmosphere due to the maturity of its employees. A lot of the employees, especially those that have been here 3+ years, are friends outside of the workplace. This proportion of friends is also something that I’ve found unique to CAPCO vs. other organizations. Everyone does not have the same level of comfort and that has always been respected. I am not supporting inappropriate behaviour by any means – if there are such incidents, it should be reported through whoever you feel comfortable discussing it with (HR, Partner, Manager, Coach etc.) so that it can be investigated and addressed appropriately. But passing judgement on others based on your own comfort framework and taking that judgement anonymously to a public forum rather than resolving through any one of the many channels that exist internally just exhibits the same level of maturity and problem-solving that I referred to in the point above on favouritism – it’s not a surprise that the same person/people have these same issues.

Cons

Very poor work culture as it is completely ad-hoc and not process driven at all
There is no professionalism among senior management

Cons

No specific cons that I can think of

Cons

- Not a true consultancy - primarily long-term implementation projects
- Work is not challenging
- A few large projects employ the majority of employees (lots of contractors)
- Has become a development shop/delivery centre

Cons

- Favouritism is rampant.
- There's an "inner circle". You are either part of it or outside it and feel left out.
- Infrastructure in the Toronto office needs a lot of work. They really need more space. The office is overcrowded.
- Very similar to a college campus non-professional atmosphere all the time.
- Loud chatting and gossiping is not just accepted, but encouraged.
- Professionalism is lacking a LOT.
- Work life balance can be bad at times, and you can be expected to work weekends, although not very often.

Cons

Previous reviews have not been inaccurate. There is a VERY small group of partners who produce sales. As mentioned in a previous review, there are partners that seem to have no real purpose, other than showing up a couple days a week. Others seem talk for years, about “the big deal” but have seemed to not produce or need a lot of hand holding to close a deal. Of the partners that do produce, sales, most of them seem line their project staff to take the fall and to protect themselves from any client fallout. Often it’s the people left behind after the partners have moved on to their next client (victim) who are left to pick up the pieces and shoulder the blame.

If you can survive those projects you’ll find yourself in great shape to withstand anything that the corporate world can throw at you.

The performance expectation framework is rarely followed in the Canadian office, ad hoc application of standards to some employees and not to others and a generally broken review process where the loudest voice in the room at round tables gets their way and performance ratings end up all over the map.

In their responses on this forum, HC keep claiming how they have an open and transparent process in place and how they’re fixing or have fixed this. They haven’t (HC in NY talks a lot but have few results to show for it. It seems that when they “fix” the review process, they only make it more broken.

Lack of a 360 process – A previous review highlighted the lack of a 360 review process. There was an attempt at creating this a couple of years ago but seemed to be a side effort with very little senior leadership support. The effort really fell flat.

A 360 review should be part of all promotions discussions to senior levels (PC and above). The big barrier to success of the program, other than leadership support, is that Capco has tried to manage this internally and there is a widespread lack of trust that any feedback is confidential.

As noted in the previous review, the lack of a true mechanism for feedback from junior resources regarding more senior resources results in people only managing their careers “upward”. Often this creates an impression/reality of sucking up and certain leadership seem to almost adopt some of these individuals as their favorites. Sometimes that favoritism is deserved because some of these individuals are high performers. Unfortunately, often, some of these people are just good at assigning blame for their own mess ups and poor performance.

Inappropriate behaviour – Yes it is the elephant in the room, but it is nothing new. There have been previous reviews here that spoke to this and they have been consistently here for some time (referring to the office as a frat house among other things).

Nothing was done then and, while Capco will provide lip service to actions they will take, there is no confidence in the office that anything will change and, because nothing has been done in the past, people are highly unlikely to step forward to raise concerns to a corporate function (HC) that they don’t trust. This is particularly true in Toronto where local HC, although trusted, do not have the staff to address concerns without escalating to NY and the NY leads haven’t made an appearance in Toronto (to my knowledge) for over a year. (TBH, I'm not sure senior management want NY HC in the office. HC may find out a few things)

While being careful not to diminish the gravity of the issues (both real and rumoured), it seems corporate HC has either turned a blind eye to these issues or is so disconnected from the goings on in both the Toronto and New York office that it borders on negligence. Given that a lot of the stories of the inappropriate behaviour in New York make it to Toronto and vice versa, it’s hard to believe that corporate HC are oblivious. If they are truly this disconnected then there needs to be some serious questions asked of the general competence of this function in Capco.

Ultimately, this is an issue of individuals and should be addressed that way. HC is right in saying there needs to be a reminder of corporate policy. That part they do have right. The real question are

- will HC directly address the behaviours of those who have caused the issues to be raised (yes there are many)?

- Do the HC people in place today have the ability to create anything but a public facing response? Can they be the agents of change?

- Can the HC organization start to regain the trust of staff? Based on the number of anonymous responses, including mine. HC is currently not trusted to address some of these long standing concerns in a confidential and thorough matter. (Other than passive aggressive responses on this site that don't, in any way represent perception of staff or the reality of HC's performance)

We’re talking about trust and trust is based on perception and a track record of results. So far, there has been a total lack of results on any of these topics from HC (despite what their claims are here).

Cons

moving away from traditional consulting towards dev boutique

Cons

1. One of the biggest flaws of the company in my view is that it is now a LARGE firm (300+ contractors + fulltime) with the governance and organization of the small company it was several years ago. How is it that the company has tripled in size over the last several years but many of the company’s necessary auxiliary functions (Human resources) have not grown proportionately? This has created some fundamental problems. For example, we have performance management tools but nobody to enforce their usage. We have a broken review system (more on that below) that never seems to get fixed. We have a laundry list of ‘nice-to-have’ improvements that seem to go into a suggestion box and never come out (addressed below).

2. 360 Feedback – I’ve heard many people suggest that a 360 feedback system is necessary, but so far in my tenure at Capco nothing has been done to achieve this. Without a 360 feedback system, we’ve created a culture of ‘managing up’. I can think of many examples where certain individuals are good at ‘talking a good game’ or getting personable with the right partners, but when it comes down to having the necessary skills and expertise to deliver a project, they are lacking. Without a 360 feedback system, there is no voice for more junior resources to shed light on the weaknesses of their direct managers or suggest areas of improvement. In my view, there are many people in their current positions that are not fully ready to handle their current positions, but their flaws are largely brushed under the rug. If we continue down this path, the quality of Capco’s delivery will eventually suffer from this short-sighted way of thinking.

3. Broken Review System and Favoritism – It’s no coincidence that this is a strongly contested issue, year in and year out. The fact of the matter is that, regardless of the number of changes we make to the performance review structure, it still remains broken. This is partly related to #2 above (lack of 360 feedback) but also due to the company’s emphasis on Partner approval as the ‘competitive edge’ necessary to set yourself apart from your peers and push you to the next level. This is fundamentally flawed because the Partners are not working on the projects day in and day out and they do not have a holistic view of an individual’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result of this, we promote people that are not ready to be promoted (above problem of ‘managing up’) and also miss a lot of promotion worthy candidates – those who are project delivery stars that simply do not get the recognition they deserve. I don’t have a perfect solution for how to fix this, but I know that it needs to be re-explored very seriously. The performance review framework is just another example of a system that might have worked well for a small company that does not scale well to Capco’s current size. There is a ‘rubric’ that employees are measured against yet the performance reviews continue to feel subjective and arbitrary. While this topic has been beaten to death, don’t be fooled by anybody that tells you that favoritism is not an issue at Capco, because I agree that it is still rampant.

4. Inappropriate Behavior – this is the elephant in the room. The fact of the matter is that there is a lot of gossip and rumor-mongering, and we as individuals need to be more diligent about spreading stories around and understand the implications and consequences of spreading rumors, especially to those that are named. That being said, the reality is that there are NUMEROUS first hand accounts of inappropriate behavior, the last town hall being just the latest example. This is not an isolated event, but rather a pattern of disrespectful behavior, not just towards women but towards everybody who might expect a higher level of accountability and integrity from those that lead us. This is not necessarily one individual’s actions, but the actions and acceptance of many.

5. Building on above, the response to last week’s post has been weak, to say the least. The overall tone of the response completely misses the mark entirely. This is not a cry for help, this is a call for accountability, which are not the same thing. It seems that nobody in a position to make a change or speak on this issue has any intention of doing so. Does Capco as a firm even care? Here’s a perfect example: Capco monitors reviews on Glassdoor carefully and is usually quick to respond to all reviews, including the MOST RECENT. The one review that actually has a significant amount of attention gets radio silence, not even an acknowledgement. If they thought it was a legitimate problem, would they not have addressed it? With the way that the world is changing and the way that scandals are now being brought to light, we often think about how people get away with things for so long, and how we can do better moving forward. The best way to move forward is to lend a voice and be the change. I hope speaking up, even in an anonymous forum, can help us progress and move forward.

Cons

Depends on the work you want to do - Capco's expertise is in technology implementation and as such most of the work is focused in this space. It would be great if there were more strategic engagements that allowed the financial services expertise here to shine through.