Avanade reviews

Being a subsidiary of Accenture and Microsoft, it often happens that Accenture has the lead in the project. They tend to see programmers from Avanade as 'production units', write the code and write is fast. If you are someone who just graduated and you don't want to go into programming but want to get into IT strategy, information management, business IT processes, etc., forget it. They say you first have to start on technicall jobs before you are able to say something meaningfull about business IT processes. They seem to focused on Sharepoint implementations only lately, there is a great demand, thats true, but if all they seem to have is sharepoint then there isn't much choice is there? Also we have seen several senior management leaving last year, heard stories that Avanade isn't the startup-like company it used to be.

Professional services is a difficult business from a work/life balance perspecitve and Avanade faces the same challenges that many services firms do. Consultants are on the road a significant amount of the time, spend significant amounts of time in hotels and airports, and the lifestyle is generally not conducive to family life. As such, many strong people leave the company as they marry, have children, and seek a balanced life. In addition, Avanade has grown to the point where it's no longer a small firm (over 8k employees) but still lacks the commitment when it comes to basic people resources and infrastructure required to run a a growing company. People management and processes typically take back door as employees are consultants 95% of the time and managers maybe 5% of the time. At Avanade, it's absolutely critical to have a strong advocate as your career manager. Failure to do so will have a negative impact on your career.