Pros
At the time when I joined Appirio, I was disappointed by the Service industry in general. In my experience of SI's of all sizes, I’ve found that people were considered as commodities and treated as such. Little care about employee burn-out, little interest in developing people, no consideration whatsoever for team morale. It is surprising as it all participate in nurturing top notch consultants who will become capable to handle more challenges.
At Appirio it's not working like that at all. First, Appirio is championing one approach of Customer Experience based around the employees: the Worker Experience. Because it’s the policy to eat your own dog food, employees are taken care of, they are provided with top qualities tools (check my new MacBook Pro) and general use of cloud apps make remote collaborative work a reality. In fact the company only use cloud computing and doesn’t run any server!
There are multiple practices, I’m working in the Salesforce one. My colleagues are all experts in one thing or another which makes project work less stressful than in previous experience. There’s a great ambiance at work and I’m always smiling when I’m going to the office. There’s quite a few funny characters and some good banter too. There’s often a cool musical background and the dress is quite relaxed: focus in on results not appearance. As a result, people don't leave after a few months as I've witnessed in my recent past, hence delivery teams remain very stable for the duration of an engagement.
My management is quite caring and spend enough one-to-one time with me in my opinion. We went through an acquisition, but the culture is unchanged. The project methodology is very robust and efficient and the implementation tools built on Salesforce are unbelievably powerful.
All in all, this has been my best career move ever and it’s why I’m sharing my feedback here on Glassdoor; I wouldn’t usually bother. Appirio offered me the break I have been looking for years and I am now relaunching my career. It feels good. :)
Cons
Hmmm.. not sure what to whinge about really...
