CGI Group Reviews in Montreal, QC Area

Pros

CGI will not force you to stay in a mandate if you had enough.
If you do not have a mandate they will pay you to stay in the office (inter-mandate).
Good salary.

Cons

Being a consultant, I'm always out of the office and I do net get any mentoring, support from CGI. You better learn by yourself.
Not being in the office, it’s very difficult to get a promotion.
No bonuses (profit sharing) and when we get one it’s around 250$.

Advice to Senior Management

Being a consultant, often alone in my field, on a customer site, I sometime have to do tasks I’m not familiar with. If I have questions about these tasks, I do not feel comfortable asking the customer because I’m the expert.

So to better help the customer, a formal way to find a coach (champion) to answer my questions would greatly help my work and the customer satisfaction.

Pros

- Best hourly rate in the market for this type of job
- Career in management
- Good employee treatment
- If you are a part-time student you can study in-between calls

Cons

- Not great for technical career growth
- Salaries stay the same even though you are promoted
- After 6 months, the job becomes boring

Advice to Senior Management

No advice

Pros

Pros? Ok, got to think to this one...
One pro is the office location, which is very convenient, nice and neat.
Then I have a hard time to find others. Maybe for the CV is a good asset to have, especially if the recruiter does not know much insider information about the company.

Cons

Ok, here the list is endless, so I have to try to summarize the principal ones.
Foremost problem is upper and middle management. Unfortunately in this company you get promoted either out of seniority or out of your ability to do corridor talks and other chit-chat activities with people who have the power to promote. Competency is out of the picture. I have too many examples of this and my colleagues all agree. You at 50 y/o might end up having a 28 y/o manager who has done well her work in the company corridors and has stacked around long enough.
Your manager will essentially be a HR function. He/she will not know much of what you do, only thing is to make sure all your hours are billable.
When you get hired the hiring person will mention you paid overtime but, be forewarned, most managers do not approve any so that they can look good with their supervisor (remember: the ultimate objective is cost cutting here...).

The ineptitude of management is chronical of the IT industry and CGI is no exception. However I also worked at IBM and management was more competent there. Here you get a bunch of HR people promoted to high profile positions who will never have a clue of your work challenges.
Just note this: that there are VPs without a university degree!

The pathetic focus for cost cutting shift the real focus on cutting waste. Since the management ability is what it is, they focus on the easiest thing to do: after all cutting expenses is much easier than cutting waste.
Effort duplication is everywhere. Company politics and, again, management ineptitude, make any decision a drag. Everything takes forever. Obvious decisions cannot be taken fast because everybody has to be aware and agree.

Believe me, for project managers this company is a nightmare. If you are a secretary or an HR person the company might be for you. Your chances to move ahead are as high as your ability to excel in corridors chat. Starting from a clerical position you can become a manager if you stick around for a while with the right people. What other company can offer you that?

Advice to Senior Management

Read above. It is all about management....
Anyways, congratulations guys: probably in no other company you would have made it so high!

Pros

Possibility to go at different environment and learn from every client

Cons

No mentoring, Don't feel considerate by high management. No training.

Advice to Senior Management

don't want to comment

Pros

Well known and recognised in the IT market
Large range of IT jobs
Possibilities of working wiht High Knowledgeable co workers to share expertise

Cons

Demand that staff work an extra 2.5 hours without salary increase
Do not always consider family life
Company revenues seems to be more important that customer satisfaction

Advice to Senior Management

Company revenues seems to be more important than customer satisfaction. That doesn't pay in a long run and may be the beginning of major contract lost.

Pros

large customer base and if you are able to travel ALOT, you may be able to pick some decent positions

Cons

Global Delivery means that the Layoff Temporarily employees at a whim. Management (senior) is running business from excel and nothing else. Director position is a disaster, overworked, underappreciated. Huge gap between staff, directors, VP's

Advice to Senior Management

Stop squeezing every drop of revenue out of the BU's, start putting real investment. Stop lying about how great low cost centers are (offshore like India). What a disaster...

Pros

Open for another project opportunity

Cons

short bench time, have to find a mandate in time otherwise laid off

Advice to Senior Management

should provide consultant more opportunities before dismiss them

Pros

Good work-life balance
Training opportunities
Some career opportunities

Cons

Greedy company
Not looking at the future

Advice to Senior Management

Look at long-term instead of short-term

Pros

Technical personnel is generally very capable and willing to help. Unlike managers, they represent a true asset of the company. I have been working for more than 2 years, possibly less than 5% of the technical personnel I met I would rate as incompetent. Conversely, for manager this percentage would be 95% (and note that I am part of the management force too...).
Office in Montreal CCE building is very neatly laid out and a comfortable place to work on.

Cons

Webster defines a bureaucrat as "an administrator concerned with procedural correctness at the expense of people's needs". This, in my view, accurately describes the CGI way of doing things. Management is obsessed with processes and if employees complies to the gazillion number of CGI processes. They don't care how you're actually doing, how you feel about your work, they simply want to do if you're a good soldier by acting and thinking like a CGI cardboard template. Focus is on process compliance. All the rest is in the background, including client satisfaction.
I've rarely seen managers with so little insights about what's really going on. Even if you prompt a manager to "think", he/she (really many "she" lately) will react negatively by reminding you what this is the way things need to be done.
Luckily enough for them, the competition is equally mediocre, at least in Canada, so they can get by this way...
I also remark that the company pretends to have an "international" status but that is not true. Basically all the work force is in 3 countries, Canada, US, India. Some of the international offices are fake (i.e. Italy: there is no such office).

Advice to Senior Management

I know you think you can get by anyways because the competition is not any better.
However, more focus on delivering results in terms of client satisfaction rather than focusing on internal processes compliance would be something this company needs badly.

Pros

Autonomy, intrapreneurship, huge challenges, very client focussed, excellent financial management of company, internal politics are not day to day headaches: metrics are clear

Cons

year after year top execs fail to translate the excellent messages to employees into actions; turnover metrics mislead: the published numbers are low but mask the failure to build and maintain entreprise knowledge; power seems to gravitate towards ex-Bell executives; too many headhunters are not impressed with the value of CGI experience

Advice to Senior Management

Implement a succession plan for all top execs except CEO; retire founder; ask clients what metrics should be included in Client Satisfaction Surveys; ask employees what metrics should be published in Member Satisfaction Surveys; study then implement best practices in employee development