Company: IBM
Date: 2010-05-31
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

IBM GBS needs more PROS at the project level and less CONS at the Partner Level.
Pros: Project work was very rewarding and I was able to work with many outstanding and smart people during my 8 1/2 years at IBM GBS some of whom remain friends today.  With a handful of exceptions, our project managers were nothing short of magicians in the way they balanced customer satisfaction, profitability, and teamwork.  They were often handed projects that were D.O.A. and they revived them with some CPR and hard work to finally deliver a healthy patient.
Cons: Project discipline and methodology changed from project to project because the fixed price deals and their delivery dates being signed by IBM sales were often impossible to deliver successfully without many project change requests and schedule slippages.  Additionally, IBM sales teams got paid on the PROJECTED profitability of the deals UP FRONT and their input and clarifications  frequently disappeared after the deal was signed.  The IBM matrix management culture simply does not work.  Your direct report manager may not even work in the same discipline as you do and cannot provide fair feedback about your performance.  It is the exception and not the rule that you work on a project your blue pages (direct report) manager even knows about.  You were given very high utilization targets (83-89%) which made you a target for layoff if you were on the bench and prevented you from taking time off if your utilization was below par.  Additionally, the consulting business model is moving toward greater reliance on off-shore resources which keep IBM rates competitive but has an unnecessarily downward impact on successful project delivery.