CGI Group Reviews in Montreal, QC Area

Pros

Benefits are very good
Bonus are good
Salary are high
Good training from the start
Team leader support
Well structured

Cons

Lack of communication from upper management except for corporate communication
Repeted tasks can become boring after a while
Hard to maintain motivation
Job not quite interesting
Specific rules: Upper management not able to adapt and understand special situation vs employee's objectives

Advice to Senior Management

More communicative with employees and show human relation skills. Could offer more opportunities within the company.

Pros

Well located
Dedicated and professional people
 excellent Clientele and challenges
Good social involvement
started recently health and life balance programs and gym well needed.
Small bonus but excellent 40h salaries.
International but very isolated divisions.

Cons

Everyone have to billed some customers and projects. Money machine for TSX.
pressure is usually high so are the challenges and most clients.
Lots of burnouts, could be avoided if management did some mentoring
Everyone is a consultant! Lots of grey hair thinking with it experience.
Little training and top down management very imper$onal

Advice to Senior Management

More team work, more solutions and repeat businesses then custom consulting a la carte or body shop. Match a new blood with a gray hair on projects. Go cloud or die with your staff.

Pros

1. Very PRO for employees teleworking.
2. Able to grow within the company

Cons

1. Stressful environment.
2. Sporadic layoffs
3. Processes are very heavy and usually impact clients

Advice to Senior Management

streamline and improve internal processes and efficiancy.

Pros

Location is good; Share purchase plan is good; Flexibility of work; Can work from remote even permanently (if that is of interest)

Cons

Foremost downside? Poor processes, or better, too much process for everything. This company is cumbersome such as those gigantic, messy, nightmarish firms like Bell, HydroQC or alike. I worked for Bell too: CGI is just the same. Such a mess that you will never be able to get it right from the first time. You learn by making mistakes and that is ok because everybody here does. Your manager will understand, or maybe will not because the moment could be tough.

Advice to Senior Management

I am shocked how poor the management of this company is. The technical workforce does not deserve this! I have left the company a week ago and I bet 10,000$ that nobody has read the feedback I have left for the management. Why? Well, they will never care. Tomorrow they probably will be elsewhere, at CGI or in another company (12% turnover this year: must be a record in the industry).
My job has been a nightmare from day one. No training, your manager has literally no idea of what your job is, just will assign you to manage some projects and will then ask you questions when it rains. Roles and responsibilites are very poorly defined. Nobody knows exactly who does what and most people plays around this lack of clarity. For project managers this is a nightmare. For other roles, it provides excuses to pass away the request to someone else. "Sorry, that is not my task to do" is what I heard from day one. Also, the project management office is completely useless: they pretend to control the situation by making us fill a ridiculous amount of documents on a periodic basis. Added value for the client:: zero. Or less, because this overhead actually detaches us from coordination work. But the management does not care: they care of reporting, not coordination and client satisfaction.
I thought I had touched the bottom at Bell: no! Project management at CGI is even worse. I am now with CN: now we talk project management! My advise to management: please pay a visit to CN and learn that a large company can operate in a lean way by cutting waste. Reduction of non value added activities, work duplication, processes shrank to the bone of the "just what is necessary" (less is more). It is not impossible, other companies did it.

I am sure some HR employees are posting here some fake reviews. I am seeing some enthusiastic reviews which smell fake. You do not hear satisfied people during lunch time in our food court.

I do not recommend this company to anyone. My son is now 22: I will make sure he leaves this company out of his search criteria.

Pros

Good variaty of technologies
Good oppertunities to increase knowledge and skills

Cons

Middle management must develop there leadership skills. We have several good managers but very few good leaders. They must also learn to appreciate and recognise good work and develop a positive approach.

Advice to Senior Management

Middle Mangement needs to learn how to lead people. To appreciate and recognize there work

Pros

- Flexitibily for taking some time off the job
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Cons

- In December 2010, working hours in Montreal where increase from 37.5 hours per week to 40 hours per week without providing any kind of compensation to employees.
- Information sessions from management consist essentially of endless statistics on revenues and profits. Management considers that aiming at an increase of x% in revenues and (or) profits - without a clear view of how it will be achieved - is a 'plan'.
- Outside of it's subsidiaries in the US, CGI is a body shop, without any specific expertise.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of the bean counters, and stop using the RH group as a propaganda machine

Pros

Office layout and location - Really good! Can do remote work (if that is what you want)

Cons

Sinking because of poor management, this company has no future.
It is painstaking to note how incompetent the management of this company is. My perspective is somehow narrow but not enough so to prevent me to see how poor the management of this company is. After all it is not entirely their fault: here you get promoted thanks to corridor chats ability and seniority, plain simple. Ask around to other employees (even managers) and that is not just my opinion but a consolidated fact. Lately it also helps to be of female gender.
The company is so pathetically unproductive that is now desperately seeking to gain ground by adding more control, which translates into unneeded overhead which is never accounted for in any cost-benefit analysis carried out (if any...) in management rooms. It is very obvious that the company has now the agility of an elephant and in this industry obviously you can't survive with those characteristics (but go an explain it to the so called management....). Also there is a chronic problem of hiding the dust under the carpet and the inability to take firm, groundbreaking decisions. Never a change for the better is chosen, rather the change that seems to bring the most short-term savings.
I thought IBM was bad, and in fact is (I.T. sweatshop is what it describes it better), but I got to admit that the average productivity of an IBM employee is 4x the one of a CGI's one.
I would suggest this place for clerical workers only. This is the core-business of the company, whether it admits it or not. If you want to hide or pretend to be busy and surfing instead the internet (even better if working from home, something the company actually encourages: of course, it brings savings! Productivity loss? Naaaah, too difficult to assess and measure, just forget it....) this may be a company you'll enjoy. Your boss will have no clue of what you are doing and, don't worry: it is just normal here!

Advice to Senior Management

Company production: 20% deliveries, 80% overhead compliance. Trust me, I am not exaggerating. Now, we are not Hydro Quebec or or the Ville of Montreal: we cannot survive this way. It is no surprise we are losing the major clients and not getting new ones. Perhaps the most effective solution would be to close entirely the Canadian operations and offices and rely only on the US ones which seem to be the only ones winning new business.

Pros

They value the fact that you have a life outside of work and that it's important to ensure that their employees balance work and family appropriately. Benefits reflect this as well. Their is a decent recognition for a job well done, although it may be a bit slow in coming sometimes.

Cons

The pay really is sub-standard. The benefits do offset it to a degree, but part of the result is a lower-than-average level of expertise within the organisation, genreally speaking (but there are a few very bright and competent people too!). The standard share purchase plan (while appreciated) does nothing to motivate better performance.

Advice to Senior Management

Consider the cost of lower pay vs quality of talent that will attract. Closing the gap to some degree will pay much higher dividends in talent base.

Pros

flexibility, opportunity to change in many group

Cons

Instead of developing an application that suits your needs, the company would rather buy one that makes the job a half.

Advice to Senior Management

listen and chalange employers on what there needs on floor.

Pros

Flexibility of directors for personal time and flexibility to manage my own hours

Cons

The recent change from 37.5 hs a week to 40 hs. a week was a very bad desition that contradict what I was told before take that job.

Advice to Senior Management

In Quebec they should revert the 40 hs a week....its was a very bad desition