ZS Associates Reviews

Pros

Great learning opportunities, excellent peer group, culture and integrity of the company. Cross functions teams build your skills for international projects .

Cons

Work is highly analytical and more of a back end kind of job. Exposure to the client is limited till you climb the ladder.

Advice to Senior Management

Team building is critical for success of the project, so take in the opinion of the team members on what roles they wish to undertake in each projects rather than just assigning them work.

Pros

+ Brand Recognition within Healthcare
+ Smart and helpful people (at all levels)
+ Right amount of flexibility
+ Interesting work, if you take the initiative

Cons

- Work life balance (if you dont know how consulting is)
- Very Sr. Management is still sometime stuck in old school thinking
- Variable mix of managers/Principals

Advice to Senior Management

I have seen a lot of positive changes in the company in last 12 months - defined vision, more structure, emphasis on branching out of pharma and setting up industry standard expectation from management group. Keep this going.
However some of the initiatives have a short outlook, dont be penny wise pound foolish.

Pros

Challenging work with very smart people to help resolve the issues and help you see things that you and, perhaps, the client missed.

Cons

Lot of work being outsourced, frankly sometimes have problems understanding what is being said by co-workers in Asia. They try to instill a ZS way to do things, but not sure how well they are succeeding due to what seems like explosive growth in heads.

Pros

People are very smart and the firm is well run overall
Stable work enviroment
Compensation and benefits are good
Leadership is very approachable
Always feel supported by team leaders
Opportunities to take on projects outside of normal scope of responsibilities

Cons

Performance expectations are very high (not necessarily a negative, but may be surprising to someone that has worked elsewhere)
Promotion opportunties not clear at times

Pros

The friendly atmosphere, open door policy of senior management and a collaborative culture make it a great place to learn a lot of new things really quickly. The work allows you to either get a broad perspective or great depth in knowledge of various business domains.

Cons

There is no clear long term growth plan for middle management folks.
Partial staffing on multiple projects is a fact of life here. This can play havoc with your personal life. Long hours are not that uncommon.

Advice to Senior Management

As the company has grown rapidly, several new "rules" and "regulations" have been added. This is perhaps, required for a larger employee base. But some of these rules, added as knee jerk reactions to one-off incidents, should probably be handled on a case by case basis rather than being made rules/norms. Fixing them as rules, leads to a feeling of being distrusted, among employees who are sincere and have good intentions (which is the overwhelming majority). "Treat people right" needs to be shown by the company, w.r.t to its employees, if you expect employees to adopt that value when dealing with each other and clients.

Pros

- Development projects give you a wide scope for learning.

Cons

- Personal / social life gets on the back seat.
- No technology expertise as a resource end up working on multiple technologies as per the requirement
- No long term onsite
- Prior experience doesn't get you any points for promotion.

Advice to Senior Management

- People with prior experience should be get appropriate hikes / promotions as compared to freshers.

Pros

Great learning curve, and growth opportunities offered.
Focus on Business alongside Technology you're working in.
Good for first job.
Casual work culture, with focus on quality.
If you're lucky enough you'll get a decent travel opportunity, for a short duration of course.
Best if you are a workaholic.

Cons

Very crunched deadlines.
No streamlining of important areas within a project
Not much stress on employee soft skills, and sometimes disrespectful behavior by few managers/consultants.
You have to be on your toes every single minute of work you put in. So it tends to get stressful at times. Not fit for you, if you have a tendency to get complacent at times.
Bad work-life balance.

Advice to Senior Management

Retention of employees working for a long time.
Arrange for frequent softskill trainings and focus on an individual's personal/professional growth.
The expertise of BTA managers need to be reviewed.

Pros

Is the best consulting firm in Pharma sector. If you are interested in operations work, ZS is definitely a good bet.

Cons

Most of the client are in the Pharma sector. So, lack of vividness. The company has just started to expand. So, man-management skills are not the best.

Advice to Senior Management

Expanding was always going to be the next big thing, and was long overdue. It's good that we have set a vision for 2020. But, let us have a clear cut plan of how we want to expand. It's very important to get out of the vicious circle of expanding-projects. The expansion phase over the last year wasn't properly planned. We need to work on that. Second, we need to develop our intellectual capital. Research Capability group need to be strengthened a lot looking forward. It's going to be the thing that will make inroads for us into the PI sector.

Pros

Work life balance
small teams
nice people

Cons

Lack of transparency in salary structure, bonus

Pros

Office culture and centricity is great - most of my projects have been done without me having to travel all over. Also really appreciate that the principals are practioners; they really know their stuff and are not just a sales force.

Cons

Hours can be long and unpredictable. Some risk of being locked in more singular industry (Pharma), although that seems to be changing. This is a place where there are a lot of really analytical people - some evidence of analysis/paralysis.

Advice to Senior Management

Have seen lots more communication on vision and strategy in the last year - great!! Please keep it coming and expand it. Be more aware of work/life balance challenges.