Ok so when you are a consultant you aren’t rated on the same things that you are in a normal occupation. You don’t have a set role and everything is in flux all the time. How well you deal with this is a big part of your rating. The other big part is a figure called utilization. This is the number of billable hours you have accumulated divided by the number of possible hours of work. So basically the more you work the higher your rating, though only if you work on client projects, or approved sales projects if you work on other firm initiatives it counts for zip. Anyway there is a large base number for the year that is the standard, it does not get discounted if you train, take vacation, are on jury duty, or any other rating. Also just like in a law firm these businesses are big pyramid schemes. So the more junior you are the more you need to work to get a good rating.
So we got a message from our PMO. It basically said to cap our hours at a certain point and go back and change our hours for the previous weeks to also be under that cap. Therefore we would be losing credit for hours we actually worked. This sucks! There is probably no worse thing you could do to an analyst or even a consultant. It’s not like it’s our fault that the project is over budget. Really it is the PMO’s they under sold it, they didn’t get the promised resources from the client, they let the scope slide, and they didn’t negotiate more funds from the client. All we did was work our tales of for months. We did not get to work the promised 3-4-5 for months, worked 12-14-16-18 hour days, didn’t get to participate in some of the more fun firm activities because the schedule was so tight, but I guess we should get screwed for it!
Well, one redeeming part of our firm is actually how seriously they take business ethics. In fact they have set up a hotline for the company run by a third party to investigate unethical behavior. One of their biggest pushes is for people to bill what they work! Haha. So no kidding with in days of the email going out that specifically stated that we needed to reverse our hours we had a conference call on a Friday specifically stating that they had ‘mis-worded’ the email. So what we are guessing is that one of the managers on the project called the hotline and told them about the email. So while we were all pretty torqued about it for a while in the end we just get to laugh. And more then likely the project manager got into trouble for it so hopefully he’ll think twice before screwing with the underlings!
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