Avanade Reviews

Pros

Every day exciting new customer opportunities roll in the door. Growth at Avanade is a daily activity. Your customer and peers at Avanade make life interesting and fun.

Cons

Watching a small company become a big company has it's challenges. You have to put it into perspective and focus on things you can control and improve.

Pros

- You get to see a lot of different projects
- Travel perks are decent... if you get to travel
- Better than being unemployed

Cons

- Awful pay
- Atrocious working hours
- Most of the talent has jumped ship
- Technical expertise is not rewarded
- Pointy haired middle management
- The more you find out about the work you've done, the more you feel like you've cheated someone

Pros

Learn technology, people really trying to implement development of .NET

Cons

turnover is reaching 40%, only upper levels remains due to high salaries. Focus is on sales (even when it is clearly not possible to deliver) only thus creating a fleeing of real brain power.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop focusing on promoting people that really do not bring any value for future growth down the line (3 years +)

Pros

Excellent opportunity to learn new technologies and grow professionally.
Some of the smartest bunch of technical people.
Company invests a lot of money and time in training employees on Microsoft technologies and soft skills -- in-person, virtual instructor led, self-paced, third party, you name it.
Awesome training group, much better than most Microsoft technology companies.
Excellent infrastructure for knowledge sharing, networking and beta testing of new Microsoft technologies.
Great benefits.
Opportunity to travel all over the US. Depending on whether travel fits your life style, this could be a minus.

Cons

Top heavy -- Way too many managers in every service line. This creates a lot of clumsy processes and also hampers career growth for everyone else.
Depending on whether you are in consulting or ATS service line, noticeable difference in organizational respect and in benefits.
Career Manger role is mostly a formality; your manager won't care as long as your billing hours are high and your project manager did not give you bad rating. They lack organizational maturity and/or backbone to resolve your issues.
Promotional opportunity depends on how well you click with your regional and service line leadership.
Avanade delivery managers try to imitate Accenture PMs. I don't understand why every project needs clones. Most of these managers don't seem to care about the team's wants and needs and behave like slave masters. They are on the project mainly because of their chargeability; not to add value.
They will nickel and dime you on salary negotiations.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on grooming qualified people
Streamline unwieldy processes
Mandate timely feedback on project managers from their team.

Pros

Good projects, smart people, who care a lot about what they do. Committed, interested and genuinely passionate about ms technology.

Cons

Hard work, lots of travel, demanding clients and working with accenture is sometimes not much fun. Lotsmof process, lots of review

Advice to Senior Management

More discussion around the vision of what we are trying to achieve is required to help people engage effectively with the company.

Pros

-Training
-Benefits
-Smart People
If you are looking for a place where your opinion matters and you want to make a difference, this is the place for you.

Cons

I think any organization has areas they can improve. Avanade's biggest struggle right now is the growing pains associated with moving to a enteprise level organization. Every company that makes that transition faces these issues.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue listening to your people. Obviously you are doing the right thing around training, I recommend you continue to do so.

Pros

Avanade has some very talented employees who are passionate technologists. Pros: collaborative culture, friendly environment for most part, cool technologies used internally (minus CRM), nice offices in major cities (NY, CHI, SEA), free pretzels

Cons

From a sales/bizdev perspective, majority of sales managers are former consultants, so they place a huge emphasis on delivery backgrounds in their sales people. If you come from a delivery background and want to pursue a career in sales, this is the place for you. If you don't have delivery in your background and want to be in sales this most likely won't be a good fit. Obviously there are exceptions, but my observation while there is that 75-90% of sales force are former consultants.

From a more tactical perspective, the company has severe resouce shortage issues in some of the hotter areas, i.e. sharepoint, collaboration. The accenture channel consumes most the talented resources for their projects and the direct channel is left to scrammble. If the company is serious about growing direct this needs to change.

Advice to Senior Management

If the company is committted to growing the Direct business it needs to be equitable in it's allocation of resources between Accenture/Direct.

Pros

Avanade provides technologists with excellent learning opportunities. The people care about their work. It is great to see how peers consider the needs of the customer when creating solutions for them. Being able to work with a global organization gives you a true world perspective you can't get in domestic companies. I loved being able to try to new things and venture into uncharted territory with my team. My boss always listened to my ideas even if we could not implement we found other ways to consider the options.

Cons

Difficult to get ahead if you are starting out your career. Unless you demonstrate skill. It's up to you.

Advice to Senior Management

Offer true career options for people who want to stay in technology.

Pros

work virtual smart people Microsoft technologies fun

Cons

pay is 20% below market

Advice to Senior Management

Market has become very competitive we need to do a salary survey and move to mid-point plus 10% to stay competitive

Pros

Potential to work on many interesting technologies and projects. Most colleagues are great to work with.

Cons

No work life balance. Some bully managers. No overtime (b/c you are exempt). Some managers make you work long hours to look good in front of their superiors and clients. Projects under Accenture are "priced" first, analyzed later. Pay is lower than competition. Benefits in line with competition. High turn over rate.

Advice to Senior Management

Accenture managed projects are single most demoralizing factor. Adjust your pay, you pay lower than competition, hence high turn over rate. Don't be so greedy.