Pros
Some managers care about employees and try to foster environment of collaboration, support, learning, improving. Potential for some types of technology to be helpful.
Cons
Most departments are understaffed and/or comprised of (A) employees who are new (terrible onboarding, no one knows processes, no one has time to train/mentor, so you teach yourself and sink/swim) and (B) employees who have been around forever and are completely disengaged from job. Managers don’t care or don’t have time to train/improve performance or call people on poor performance, so this puts the burden high performers to carry the load. In turn, high performers end up finding jobs at competitors that are paying up to 35-40% higher salaries for the same work. Quintiles used to be the leader in the CRO space. Since the “merger” (aka IMS takeover - make sure you NEVER mention Quintiles!) the CEO and senior leaders seem to only care about all their technology and “data science” (which is barely functional and ends up wasting and adding hours to simple tasks). Sponsors are paying a hefty price for a tech/data company that is unable to be even mediocre at basic CRO services because it’s so distracted by constantly reinventing itself every few months and using its R&D/Clin Ops group as a petri dish for new technology.