In my experience, there is a significant disconnect between senior leadership and the technical realities of the work. This often manifests as client-facing teams promising delivery timelines and budgets without consulting the technical staff. Because some of these decision-makers appear to lack a deep understanding of fire or structural requirements, the resulting workloads are frequently unrealistic, leading to rushed outputs. Senior leadership seem more interested in peddling the flowery façade that is sold to the public, and do not understand what’s involved to produce the outputs. Enjoying the ride on the money wave, while surfing on the backs of consultants who are pressured to meet unrealistic goals, and then flapping and blaming consultants when these unrealistic goals are inevitably not met.
The internal data management systems area a disorganised mess. Finding client information often requires significant internal "interrogation" of management, who are frequently unresponsive. This lack of clear communication can lead to gaps in reporting, for which the consultants are then unfairly penalized.
QUOODA is a mess and time consuming to use with most consultants consistently complaining about it internally and avoiding using it whenever possible.
There is a disconnect between all facets of the company leading to loss of information, and multiple cycles of rework which is highly inefficient. And the high staff turnover only adds to this with key knowledge being consistently lost.
Furthermore, I have serious concerns regarding the company’s prioritization of profit over quality assurance. The increasing reliance on AI for tasks requiring nuanced professional judgment is, in my opinion, a risk to the high safety standards required by the Building Safety Act.
In my view, the quality of consultancy work is currently hit-or-miss. Too often, deliverables consisted of 'recycled' text from prior reports, stitched together with little regard for logic or context. This trend of prioritizing volume over original thought highlights a systemic flaw in the Quality Assurance process that must be addressed.
The business approach feels mismanaged, and reactive rather than proactive with the priority seeming being to make short term profits, with a key example being rounds of hiring followed by redundancies shortly after, suggest a clear lack of long-term strategic planning. Recent redundancies were attributed to a downturn in work, which is not surprising as I can imagine clients aren’t satisfied with some of the outputs which are the result of rushed work (because consultants don’t have the time they need) and incoherent regurgitated information with no actual understanding or critical thought.
Finally, the internal culture is heavily siloed. The micromanaged nature of the programming leaves little room for collaboration, creating an "every man for himself" environment where senior management feels inaccessible and out of touch with the daily technical challenges.
If you are a professional who values basic communication from all colleagues, good moral (particularly with more senior staff), competent colleagues, colleagues who don’t just palm of issues as “not their problem” with no productive suggestions, and most importantly stability - You should avoid working here in my opinion.
