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

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.

Cons

- Poor/mis-management of software development projects
- Little/no training for junior developers/intro roles
- No mentorship
- Senior management is difficult to work with and unprofessional
- Sales driven software implementation projects promotes development of poor quality/buggy code to meet deadlines

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

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

moving away from traditional consulting towards dev boutique