A branch being run into the ground by textbook mismanagement
Pros
The only reason it gets one star is because of some of the decent people that tirelessly clean up mess after mess the incompetence of the management created. Without them, this branch would have easily folded quite some time ago. Although the salary may seem attractive, it is no more than an snare to lure in any unbeknown candidate who don’t know what they’re about to sign up for that this branch could hardly afford for long anyway. There is a certain degree of liberty in terms of work style, but it would seem at hindsight more likely due to the lack of proper governance and management rather than a well-coordinated distribution of manpower.
Cons
In less than a month, any new joiner would probably be able to observe the amount of problems this branch harbours. The apathy from the management would be the most apparent among them. It could be said that the management basically made no effort to hide the fact that they didn’t expect you to stay too long where the orientation for the role was at its finest brevity and zero goals would be set that left you wondering what you must do. A fair number of processes were in disarray as demonstrated by the lack of standards in operation procedure, documentation, manpower distribution, and incident response. Many customers had commented on the work style of the branch in which they described the people there didn’t work like they were in the same company. There was little if any cooperation and coordination between departments where each basically existed as an interest group that compete with one another freely and openly. Certain departments, particularly sales and presales, possessed an undue amount of power that trumped all others where payment terms of projects would be stipulated casually and enforced rarely. For whatever reason, payment retrieval had become the responsibility of the PM department where late closure of projects due to customer-side reason was a favourite spot for finger pointing by the management when finance department applied pressure. The cash flow was at one point or two so tight that it was rumoured fund had to be borrowed from the headquarters to pay salaries. Probably because of this, the finance department of this branch had changed to report directly to the headquarters some time ago instead of the local general manager who, promoted from sales director not long ago, knew almost nothing about managing an entire branch and unmistakably couldn’t care more since the revenue target was almost a mission impossible at this point. Despite the existence of a technical director who was supposed to oversee all matters technical, his presence and purpose had been a certain mystery among many under him. He did not conduct any kind of regular meeting with his subordinates and relied only on unidirectional reports in order to obtain the status quote and never cared to find out anything by himself. Most of the time, he was absent from the office albeit customer interfacing was not his primary responsibility. Business-wise, the fact that the core business of this branch relied on a single vendor was obviously a kind of rarity in nowadays business world; whereas more severely from the point of view of supply chain management, this was also an incredibly dangerous single point of failure. Certainly people in the branch would’ve voiced out such concern, yet the continuous monopoly in such business cooperation heavily favoured by the technical director would be anyone’s guess.
