Where to start?
- Projects/Clients
- The work is better described as 'business process outsourcing' where pharma company X can pay ZS to do an operational project that they could do internally, but ZS will just provide at a lower rate.
- The work is very boring, repetitive for most BAs etc - imagine having a calculator that you plug numbers into and put into a spreadsheet quarterly
- The projects are mainly with managers, maybe VPs (at small pharma companies) - not high visibility or highly rewarding
- 99.99% of the time you will be working with pharma
- Staffing is not very transparent, as managers and staffers will place you with little consideration. Most managers don't want to lose your staffing so they will 'officially' put you on a project for months, but you might actually work on separate projects for them
- Very easy to be stuck in one type of project/practice area. Some managers take it personally that you don't want to work with them anymore
- Teams/People
- Company moving towards a model of having part of the project staffed from the India offices in order to maintain a 'low - cost component'. All this means is you have to work extra hard to make sure the India staffing work is up to par, as training there is not as good.
- Company does not provide much, if any training on working with teams across offices. Most people assume that to-do lists, check-ins, weekly status calls provide enough structure to have good quality work but in reality most Associates in India are not trained well enough to thoroughly provide decent work
- Managers and above can do what they want - company has an extremely hierarchical structure where managers are not involved in most projects. They focus on selling as many easy projects rather than building good teams that solve bigger problems.
- Managers are extremely different to work for: some are extreme micro-managers while others disappear for the duration of the project while others can only provide feedback on formatting and colors. Don't they all receive the same training?
- Company Overall
- For a small firm, there is an excess of policies such as 'having to work 12 hrs in a day before qualifying for an expensed dinner'
- Most of the bonus/performance process is not transparent. Very unclear why people receive the bonuses that they do.
- The usual tactic for solving problems in this firm is create a committee that has an initiative, create a survey to gather feedback, do some grouping on the survey, and make recommendations that are usually never implemented. (Feedback from associates is never implemented)
- As the company is growing, its lost most of its fun culture which usually kept people here longer. People are hired more as 'bodies' recently to just staff on mindless projects.
For anyone considering working here: its not a real consulting job. Work here as intern max, but leverage it into something better.
