Diamond Management & Technology Consultants Reviews

Pros

Good variety in work at hand at blue chip clients
Benefits overall are the best in the consulting business - no co-pays, generous allowance for things like eye wear and so forth
Generous vacation allowance and open policy in terms of travel and location of home base

Cons

Work life balance is hard to manage on short engagements that are typical here. Sometimes alignment of internal politics plays a bigger role in terms of career advancement than client satisfaction.

Advice to Senior Management

Open to new ideas and put in place a more objective performance review process

Pros

There is transparency and a very multi-disciplanary team on every project at Diamond. The partners, if you receive the right one, are probably the most transparent and willing to progress your career. however, they end up not caring towards the end because they are concerned with sales and performance . The performace process is very opinionated and they should rid of it. Also there are a lot of useless operations people that work there, although it helps the culture of diamond to have these folks, most of the consultants spend the time doing all the internal work. Diamond is a great company to work for if you can come into the company after two years of work somewhere else.

Cons

culture, compensation, 401k, partners, and amount of internal work.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more collegiate

Pros

Challenging work, incredible colleagues, great development opportunities.

Cons

No senior management transparency anymore, we only seem to get a scripted weekly blog post that doesn't even appear to be written by the CEO.

Advice to Senior Management

Study some of the basics (ZS, etc..) on how to motivate partners on how to sell & deliver. Spend more time meeting with and talking with the key buyers of Diamond's services to understand why they buy our services.

Pros

People - they are smart, hard working and incredibly nice. You will make friends for life.

Flexibility - IF you are a top performer, mgmt will bend over backwards to make you happy: including personal stuff (leave of absence or sabatical), and ability to influence what projects to work on

Stepping stone for great job at client - do well at your client and get hired by them...and skip ahead on the career ladder (relative to your friends who graduated with you and went to work directly for the client). Esp if you want to stay within the technology org for your client - the brand name typically carries respect.

Travel / food - similar to other consulting firms, you will travel to interesting places and always eat very well. Also, work for the fun partners and you'll go on some legendary boondoggles.

Cons

Work life balance can be pretty warped. Highest priority is delivery - your personal life will be sacrificed. Of course this varies by partner / team / client. I know several ppl who had a great work/life balance...but the higher up the ladder you go, this disappears pretty fast. Anyone at manager and above is going to be working their bu** off...at principal sleep can be optional.

Advice to Senior Management

A) You need to be more transparent about the decisions you make
B) You need to get rid of the partners that consistently rank low on the 'people' dimension. You know who they are. Just because they bring in business is not a reason for them to abuse their teams. In the long run they are killing the culture and bleeding the firm of talent
C) CEO has great intensity, knows the firm and culture extremely well and has the right integrity/ethics...but he is NOT the leader who is going to grow the firm. First, he takes about three times as long to explain something as is needed (both oral and written). Most ppl tune out when he starts talking. He's simply not inspirational. Second he's had his chance...there has been no growth from 2005-2008.. Pls don't blame the environment - that is only relevant in 2008.

Full Disclosure: I continue to be a shareholder and think there is a big market for Diamond's services and potential upside for the stock.

Pros

Smart people and entrepreneurial culture

Cons

not enough bench strength and still a small company

Advice to Senior Management

figure a way to grow, compensate and reward the best and brightest throughout the firm rather than continue to promote the ideals that everyoneis great

Pros

The benefits are great, you can't beat our health coverage. Diamond affords all its consultants a great opportunity to be exposed to senior level employees at clients. The pay is comparable to that of our competition.

Cons

Poor work life balance, if you have a family that you care about, this travel heavy lifestyle probably will not work for you. Management decisions are not transparent, it always seems like they are hiding something from us, no matter how genuine they try to look. We do a terrible job building our brand, very few people recognize the name 'Diamond' as something other than a gem.

Advice to Senior Management

Drink your own Kool-aid. We spend so much of our time trying to help our clients and their management be more transparent in their practices and yet internally, only our senior most folks actually have a sense of what is going on. Your employees are not stupid, please don't treat us like we don't work with your equivalents at client sites every week.

Pros

Good pay and benefits. Good people to work with. You can get excellent exposure to top executives at clients.

Cons

Hours are long. It is heavily male dominated, with little progress towards work life balance. What little there is is dependent on the personality of the partner in charge of a specific project. The strategic direction is totally unclear.

Advice to Senior Management

Get a new CEO. Clarify our direction, strategy and tactics. Talk more openly to employees.

Pros

Unbeatable benefits, very competitive salary, and most of all - working with (mostly) smart people at great clients.

Cons

As a small firm, staffing still done by word-of-mouth; your reputation proceeds you which can be good or bad; politics play a role - but not different from other firms

Advice to Senior Management

Focus - we cannot be switching strategies and reorganizing the firm every 2-3 years. Trim the fat at the top - promote only the best.

Pros

Smart and influential colleagues, experienced senior management, interesting work, unmatched medical benefits, entrepreneurial spirit due to size of firm, transparency across the firm regarding internal initiatives and firm direction, respect from clients, humble and client-focused culture, trusted advisers, objective insights and recommendations, respect for work/life balance, situational leadership

Cons

Excessive travel, weaker bonuses compared to counterparts, sometimes redundant work, pigeon-holing in roles, staffing projects is difficult, getting staffed to preferred projects is difficult, lack of mentoring from senior management, company is currently changing direction and focusing on execution versus strategy, can be difficult for new/experienced hires to adjust to high standards embedded throughout the company's culture, cumbersome and inconsistent review process

Advice to Senior Management

Take more time to mentor junior team members, increase emphasis on training new hires, improve staffing process

Pros

Very bright people to work with, teams are flat, and they accomplish a lot. Client list and types of projects allow teams and individuals to have a huge impact for clients. Some of the best ideas come from Analysts and Associates, while Managers and Principles are open and collaborative in style. Non-collaborative types are weeded out quickly, which is good. Some of the very best and brighest people work at Diamond.

Cons

Long hours - though work life balance is talked about, it’s sometimes difficult to see in the behavior. Performance reviews can be overly complex while specific feedback can sometime seem ad hoc.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate less about what The Street wants to hear and instead talk about what the Front Line wants to hear and has questions about.