Noblis Reviews

Pros

Lots of smart, knowledgeable people
Great reputation and continued effort to be ethical and fair
Lower level employees able to focus primarily on client delivery
Opportunities to participate in company wide events, charity work etc.
Company rewards its employees for hard work
"Profits" reinvested in company rather than being distributed to a partnership
Identity and brand are gaining steam; future potential seems high

Cons

Moving to competitive contracts has required reductions in overhead costs
Company still has MITRE like roots/org structure its trying to shed
Limited external training opportunities; may change once rates are under control
MITRE carryovers have mentality of know it alls; not adapting well to changing environment
Older organization (average age) and high insurance costs

Advice to Senior Management

Continue down the path we are headed; long standing staff may not agree or completely understand the direction we're headed but its necessary for our survival; mid level staff/low level managers need more training in business development; leverage "newer" staff that have experience in these areas elsewhere as there are many "diamonds in the rough" which can help propel us forward; help ease the growing pains for all

Pros

If you are in a good group surrounded by supportive people, you will be fine.

Cons

There are a lot of bad groups to be in where people are not supportive, a lot of blame game, favorites and politics to be played resulting in a terrible place to work overall.

Advice to Senior Management

Most reviews here point to bad management. Your managers are not good managers. Your managers are not caring of employees, only how they look to upper management. Your "good" managers might look good to you but that is different from reality. You can ignore it but one day you will reach the bottom of the barrel and there will be nothing there.

Pros

Recieved multiple awards as one of best mid size companies to work for.

Cons

Current efforts to refocus the company's business model have been chaotic.

Advice to Senior Management

Do not rely so much on high level managers being brought in from for profit firms. Too often they have only one way of operating and this is in conflict with who/what Noblis has been. We now look like a company that can do most of the things that our for-profit cousins can do, but at a much higher price.

Pros

The retirement plan is the most generous I've ever seen. The rest of the benefits package is decent. There is a nice cafeteria. Nice walking trails. On good traffic days - easy to get to.

Cons

On bad traffic days, this location is horrible. The leadership is lacking. It is really important to tell the truth and some leaders have quite a difficult time being honest.
Client base is shrinking & type of work is changing.

Advice to Senior Management

Set aside your bias toward certain protected classes and focus on building stronger relationships with customers that provide truely interesting work - too many are dull assignments - just a paycheck.
Decrease the bloated overhead functions that make it too difficult to compete. Your personal share of the revenue is too high for a non-profit. Be more transparent about executive pay & perks.

Pros

Senior management appears genuinely intent on creating and fostering a good and productive workplace. If working within the confines of the Farivew Park facility, life is good. Life is especially good if you work within a rather large structural overhead segment (desktop support, financial, other backoffice parts) of the organization.

Cons

When relegated to one of the outpost company locations, or even worse, to a customer site, many of the better attributes of company life just aren't available. Of late the CEO has been chirping that, if by choice or fate, one has been so relegated, it is that individual's fault and responsbility to return to the fold.
Most underprivileged directly charging employees are expected to bill 1980 hours a year (48 weeks) with only benefit of vacation and holidays. Overhead is reserved to those special few in the good graces of a VP or director.

Advice to Senior Management

Get out of your offices. Stop worrying about your admittedly lovely view. Get down into the trenches. Understand from where your revenue comes. Productivity toys don't help when they aren't allowed to be used during working hours (customer site, anyone?). After hours isn't an answer (even if you can find a charge code).

Pros

Good people, friendly environment, nice offices, interesting projects. Very supportive middle management. Many internal opportunities to learn (ex. formal and informal training).

Cons

Low salary
Sometimes hard to find projects to work on (especially if you are "expensive", i.e. many years with the company).

Advice to Senior Management

Raise the salaries. Don't expect from the technical talent to do business development. You have great people, a wonderful culture but it is important to let people do the work they feel best at...

Pros

The modest to easy workload and low expectations of staff-level employees mean it’s a good place to finish a graduate degree or work on publishing a novel. I have even ‘worked’ with people that maintained a second job while punching the clock at Noblis.

There have been some recent improvements over the last two years. A large and very posh 8th floor “funplex” called the NICC provides a great place to play video games and eat pizza while getting paid to be ‘innovative.’

Cons

Noblis has taken the concept of employee recognition to an extreme that some employees think borders on absurdity. People are given awards for simply being a part of a team or for re-publishing the same paper for the 10th time in one of the company’s many unread publications. Noblis hands out more prizes for ‘just showing up’ than a typical college sorority

Noblis’ self-funded research is a great idea but is typically not utilized for anything innovative. The company funds initiatives in trendy areas like ‘carbon foot printing’ or ‘cyber security’ – but these efforts are usually less serious or impactful than a high school junior achievement project. Most are mothballed after a single ‘research season.’

Noblis, which was spawned from Mitre about 15 years ago, has struggled to build its own identity or grow its own market base. It survives on a few ‘milk cow’ contracts with the federal government’s GSA/FTS program that have – for some inexplicable reason – been sole sourced to Noblis since the days of Mitre. Noblis provides little more than paper shuffling amd meeting management services on these contracts. Once part of an esteemed government think tank, Noblis is now frequently viewed as a government welfare program for people with advanced degrees.

The CEO means well and has tried to change the culture of lazyness. Several high profile VPs have been brought in and have attempted to “light a fire” under the middle layer of management, only to encounter a passive but powerful and institutionalized resistance to change.

Advice to Senior Management

Bring back the platinum benefits package and scrape the ill-funded 'bonus' program. Stop rewarding mediocrity.

Pros

Best in class, Noblis is one of the most ethical companies around. They are mission focused and care deeply about doing good work. I have had great learning opportunities and supportive management. The company is extremely compassionate and have gone above and beyond to help deserving employees. Noblis going through a transition and it's nice to see management taking action to weed out employees with bad attitudes who do not contribute.

Cons

It's hard to think of anything, but improving the cafeteria and fitness facility could use upgraded. The building can be a little drab, so please add more color!

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to invest in developing your managers. While I'm happy with my manager, I do see others that are not fully engaged.

Pros

Congenial work environment. No undue pressure to make sales numbers or business development targets which allows employees to concentrate on their tasks. Generally, the work environment at the headquarters building is friendly and managers/executives are accessible.

There are many opportunities to learn about different subjects and domains. Noblis enjoys a wide range of expertise represented by the talented people employed by the company. Many one hour information sessions - covering scientific, information technology and business topics are available to Noblis employees, and sometimes guests. The presentations are sometimes done by Noblis employees who have extensive experience in the domain. Many notable leaders in their respective fields speak at Noblis (scientists, authors, former Military or Government leaders, etc.). The quantity, quality and availability of these learning opportunities is simply unsurpassed and quite a remarkable offering for a company of Noblis' size.

Noblis offers very competitive salaries to attract top talent to the company.

Working at Noblis provides a lot of opportunity to the individual regarding what work assignment they wish to work. With some reasonable restrictions, employees are generally free to market themselves to other divisions and contracts if they wish to be considered for inclusion on a specific project. Noblis will almost always put a current employee that holds the needed skill set into an open job before hiring an external candidate.

Noblis is very supportive of employees that wish to obtain additional education, certifications, skill sets - very often assisting with the cost of these endeavors (i.e. tuition reimbursement).

Noblis has very progressive teleworking, work-life balance, flexible work hours. Most managers will work very hard to accommodate an individual employee's needs.

Cons

Noblis is struggling to shift from the traditional "directed, sole-source awards" revenue model to a competitive revenue model requiring aggressive capture management and mature proposal development procedures.

Many of the employees have VERY long tenures with Noblis, starting back in the MITRE days before Mitretek Systems (rebranded to Noblis in 2008) broke away from MITRE in 1996. Although this wealth of individual experience can be a strength, several "cons" also emerge from this demographics reality. Almost all the executive and management positions are staffed by former MITRE individuals who gained their business experience within a cloistered FFRDC (Federal Funded Research and Development Center) world. Most of these individuals lack the experience or inclination to aggressively pursue Federal business in an increasingly competitive landscape. Additionally, many of these managers lack the "people skills" or any type of "management by objectives" leadership as these were long serving "technical contributors" (i.e. scientist) which were promoted by a system that seems to reward length of service over demonstrated capability. Strong cliques are in place at Noblis. If you are within one of these cliques, you are safe. If you offend or find yourself on the outside of these cliques, you can find yourself marginalized, ignored, and sometimes even searching for coverage on a project.

This has resulted in almost no revenue growth for the company in at least five years which significantly limits opportunities. Since many individuals stay with the company for much - or the entirety of the career - there is little room for real advancement. This is not a company you can join, develop business cases/proposals, execute, achieve objectives and receive compensation. The company uses metrics such as "head count" or "FTE" to measure program growth. Lacking in the analysis are financial concepts of profitability, margins, ROI, NPV and the real use of business cases for decision support.

The "Baby Boomers" are the ones running the show at Noblis. The numbers of Baby Boomers far outweighs the number of Generation X employees. Due to the bad economy and comfortable dynamics for Baby Boomers, many of these individuals have delayed retirement to continue working at Noblis. Just recently, a concerted effort was undertaken to identify, mentor and train a new generation of leaders. Unfortunately, for the Gen X crowd, the Baby Boomers have looked almost exclusively to the Generation Y crowd for future leaders and have handed out scarce growth opportunities to Gen Y over many qualified, patient Gen X employees.

Senior leadership has continued to identify, recruit and hire executive leaders, business development managers, proposal managers and other skill sets to reorient the direction of the company to the competitive space. Despite these laudable efforts, "business oriented" new hires (i.e. BD managers, sales, proposal leaders) often become frustrated with the entrenched behaviors which are slow to recognize the changing business realities and adjust the corporations approach. There is a lot of turnover with these type of individuals - business development personnel in particular as these individuals seem to be changing every 1-2 years, not enough time for a BD person to learn the entire corporation's capabilities, build rapport within the organization and engage in long term marketing efforts across the Federal government Departments and agencies.

Change is the new flag being flown at Noblis. This was started in 2008 when Noblis announced their second CEO in the company's history - Amr ElSawy. In concert with this announcement, the company was rebranded from Mitretek Systems to Noblis. ElSawy has championed meaningful policy changes and initiated programs, however, the "rank and file" of Noblis has very slow to adopt these new behaviors. Due to the scientific mentality of a large portion of the employee base, a certain profile of fierce independence, reluctance to change, the need to analyze (analysis paralysis alert!) dominates even the most minor policy or procedure change. Even changes specifically endorsed by the CEO and his executive board are challenged and resisted by the long serving, entrenched middle management of Noblis. This can be very discouraging for those supporting the innovations and programs that ElSawy is championing at the company. Some individuals are fighting these changes, while at the same acknowledging that the status quo is unmaintainable, but lack a reasonable alternative to the proposed change.

The benefits at Noblis used to be superior to almost any other company, but recently, significant cost cutting measures have reduced the value of these benefits in measurable ways. The health plan shift from 2010 to 2011 (Cigna) represents a very significant increase in employee borne cost.

Advice to Senior Management

Middle to Upper Middle management needs to be more responsive to Executive leadership. Many of the middle management types give lip service to the changes being instituted at Noblis, but their hearts and minds are not really engaged.

The annual review process for employees makes almost no sense. A scale of 1 (awesome) to 4 (horrible) was instituted this year to rank employees. Many managers told their employees that "75% of the company were threes" There seemed to be no correlation to the contribution of the employee, the value to the organization, or the financial impact of the individuals work compared to the score they received. Bottom line, costs are being passed on to the individual employee (reduction in benefits) before the incentive mechanism has been fine tuned to provide greater benefit for the valuable, hard working employees that generate the results for the organization.

Managers are often not trained, experienced or competent in handling the "people aspects" of management. Many of these individuals seemed to have landed these positions by being strong technical contributors. That is a big mistake to keep these people in these management positions. They are literally suffocating the company as they neither serve the needs of the individuals that report to them (by creating new business opportunities, utilize employee's skills correctly, etc) AND they do not serve the needs of the executives as they continue to "pick and choose" which executive initiatives they honestly support. Under the guise of "analysis" or "evaluating" these initiative, as a thinly veiled exercise in feedback, some managers seem to have no intention to embrace the new way of doing business at Noblis. There seems to be absolutely no repercussion for this behavior as they continue in their management jobs, with the same behaviors, for years. This is very demoralizing and counterproductive for the goals of the organization and most of the individuals in the organization. Significant changes are needed here!

Pros

Wonderful benefits. Great mid-level staff. Telecommuting options. Outstanding work place culture. Company supported activities such as technology brown bags, mentoring program, yoga, health boot camp, optional car services (car cleaning, tire checks) during working hours hosted by the company (paid for by the employee), PMP training.

Cons

Standards and processes are overlooked in order to impress executive management. Some of the key personnel have an elite behavior which gets in the way of constructive criticism and productivity.

Advice to Senior Management

Stay on top of project plans and communicate project goals across all tiers of participating parties. Do not expose subordinates to responsibilities outside of their title or make sure to promote to the appropriate level. Keep the staff skill set balanced and utilize resources appropriately. Express objectives clearly. Use training dollars for mid-level employees, not only management. And do not use tenure as a reason to ignore common company goals.