1. Each year, there is a mandate by the HR team to identify a bottom candidate across career levels. This is not an ideal scenario for anyone, neither for the supervisors who are forced to identify a bottom candidate by their Delivery Leads nor for the candidate who will eventually be ranked as bottom and be selected for a managed exit. If you are not good with your boss or higher ups, you can be a potential candidate to be ranked as bottom (this is all the more applicable for resources in Supervisory roles (TLs and above)).
There have been instances where roles are created to hire external resources simply to protect the existing lot (at AM and above levels). No matter how pathetic and incapable some of these guys are, they tend to cling on like parasites and are protected by their supervisors.
Advice for laterals (AM and above positions) - Make sure you do a thorough check on who the hiring manager is, his/her qualities, the team that you are going to be a part of etc. before joining this company.
2. Doctors hired for their domain expertise being promoted as Delivery/Project managers. Needless to say while these candidates might be good in Healthcare, they lack adequate knowledge and are poor when it comes to knowledge on the SDLC, STLC etc. Some are good at Story-telling and this helps them in masking their deficiencies. Some of these doctors (PMs) are unfit to be working in the area of Project management, they have no clue on Project estimation, software testing etc. They tend to get away with it by abstaining from getting involved in projects and getting themselves involved in Industry initiatives and by working on some RFPs.
3. In some cases, the Project manager and the Senior manager/Associate Director are barely involved in monitoring the overall health of the project. There are no weekly or monthly connects to discuss project health and they tend to step in only when there is a client escalation & try to figure out what went wrong, neither are there any connects to discuss the employee concerns.
4. Asking for roll-off from a project is akin to a resource committing a crime. Such resources will be targeted and planned to be ranked as a bottom candidate in the performance appraisal cycle. Its as though the project manager owning the resource, if the resource asks for a roll-off for whatever reason, then the PM sees that resource as his bottom resource for the FY & efforts are made to ensure that the resource is sent out from the firm.
5. All this talk of an open culture and strong Ethics at the workplace and them encouraging people to voice out their concerns promising appropriate action if the employee is mistreated by their peers or their supervisors is just a SHAM!!!
Do not fall for it. The HR team and the Employee Relations team are absolutely powerless and are just like Puppets. They want to keep their jobs safe and don't necessarily want to go against what the Leadership team wants. If you run into problems at work with your manager in terms of being overlooked for a promotion or are being threatened by your manager that he/she will rank you bottom and put you on PIP etc., then, it means that its time for you to move on from this place. Don't bother raising grievances (addressed by HR team) or logging Ethical complaints (addressed by Employee Relations team), coz nothing will work.
