Ally Marketing Reviews

Pros

Good People who do good work

Cons

Not ready for prime time

Advice to Senior Management

More maturity needed, not a grown up business

Pros

There is a variety of projects and it's a great stepping stone to get somewhere worthwhile.

Cons

This is not a place you want to stay. There is no clear vision at Ally and management is not paying attention. The ones that do the actual work get pushed down, are paid poorly, and are not praised. While management is going through constant promotions and bonuses, the workers are cleaning up the mess.

As soon as there is a potential for advancement, another PM is hired on to keep you where you're at. The overhead on projects is not conducive to good work. It takes a large chunk of time and money to get anything off the ground.

I have never worked for a company that makes their employees feel so insignificant and undervalued. The work suffers because there is no incentive or motivation to do better.

There has been a constant turnover of employees for the last two years. There are only about 5-10 that have been there more than 2 years.

DON'T work here. You'll regret it.

Advice to Senior Management

Start paying attention to what employees are saying. Look around you and notice poor management.The ones you should be promoting and praising are the ones bending over backward to get the work done. You will lose the talent to get the work done if you don't change your approach. You need to let go of all the processes and let the work happen and trust your employees. Stop micromanaging.

Pros

If you are interested in working on Microsoft projects and if you are needing to gain experiences, this place offers great entry level position. Just don't expect them to pay you so well.

Cons

1. Management is in way over their head. The company consists of 20 to 40 people, but they want to apply Microsoft organization hierrachy to the team. Going from a flat organization where everyone gets along and works well together to applying hierarchy org chart that isolate team members and demote team morale.

2. Recognition is extremely poor. Management seems to have their motto of "let's see how low we can pay them". You can put in all your hard work, and you will see no return. Management gives you arbitrary numbers on your reviews and lies to you about having talking to the project managers you work closely with.

3. Poor leadership. I can undestand why the executive teams from much bigger firms are far removed from their employees. This place consists of 20 to 40 people, and most of the time, there are literally 15 employees in the office, but the management is far removed from the team. They have no idea what is going and who is doing what.

4. Poor resource management. When the team complained about not having to much work and not enough resources on different projects. Instead of hiring more resources that would actually do the work, they hired more Program Managements. There are about 10 PMs and 20 employees that actually do the work.

5. Provide no career growth. This makes sense because the management has no sense of directions. Most of the time, the COO and the Vice President sit in their office, either watching youtube or listening to loud music. The CEO actually does try to find work, and the Marketing VP does try to provide some sort of management to the marketing team. But other than that, no direction, no leadership, no respect for employees.

6. The company provides no infrastructure for you to get your job done sucessfully. And when you communicate the needs, they simply dismissed your concerns or ideas.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees, hire more resources not PMS, promote within, and scale back from all these crazy re-organization. An enterprise management doesn't work for a small team of company. Maybe when you have at least 100 to 200 employees, then you can start acting like one.

Pros

1) A great group of people with a vast array of personality types.
2) Fun atmosphere if you like to kick back with a beer or to BBQ.

Cons

1) Incorporating the Microsoft business model into an organization with less than 50 employees does not scale well and unfortunatley creates an environment with a fair amount of strategic ambiquity. This creates a situation where a lot of great ideas are missed or not acted upon until the window of opportunity has passed.

2) The immediate goals of the organization do not scale well because of a lack of internal resources.

Advice to Senior Management

All the ingredients for an excellent organization are there. Scale back, recognize talent and set realistic goals. Going after everything and only getting halfway there is frustrating to everyone.

Pros

If you are someone who is interested in working with Microsoft, this would be a place to start.

Cons

There is no clear infrastructure, and poor leadership. Management often lies to the employees, and even more often, just doesn't tell them anything. Expectations are unclear, and it seems like the best way to get a promotion is to buddy up to the boss and say yes to everything he says. The owner doesn't like it when his employees disagree with him, and often takes credit for the ideas he does like. It is the strangest place I have ever worked.

Advice to Senior Management

Your employees aren't happy, and their work suffers for it. Get it together,or you are going to lose the talent that you have left.