IBM

Enjoyed the remote office environment and easy hours.

Execs oversell, managers overcommit, and PMs underestimate. You are left on an ever-shrinking team because of layoffs and attrition to deliver a solution to a customer who is already upset by the time you get to them. This is due to all the fumbles and additional charges that have occurred. Once they find out that they will receive the most basic of implementations by way of licensing tiers on everything they need, it ends up with something similar to a "small office" type configuration for their company by way of licensing.

After having seen behind the curtain of this huge circus, I would:

• Stop overselling to the customer just to win the bid – this is killing you.
• Hire real experienced PMs for their respective technologies so you even have a glimpse of a chance to deliver what was promised to the customer.
• Get rid of any dead weight. Most of it seems to be with management and people that have been shuffled around from team to team but really have no depth in the technology they now implement (poorly). Hire real experienced people that are real SMEs.
• Stop delivering bottom-tier software on every solution you implement for your customers. I am sure this is an overlooked detail in the contracts by the client, but for heaven's sake, your customers are expecting "like for like" functionality when you take over. When they receive bottom-tier software that is more limited than what they had, and are now forced to interface with the nightmare offshore team in India for support, you have now made yet another angry customer.

Speaking of the offshore team in India, they serve a great role and purpose, but you are misusing them to your disadvantage. In an effort to save money, you have fired more every year from your core support teams until you had none. All you have now on-shore is the implementation team, but no real experienced sustain teams. You now have the team in India trying to do everything, and they are not only unequipped, they are inexperienced. If you think your customers don't know this, you are lying to yourself.

Read your customer satisfaction reports for the last 3 years again and again until you finally get it.