Pico Reviews

*Highly disorganised* workload: Quite often it was the case that due to a variety of factors - whatever conditions and/or SLAs agreed with clients or project managers deliberately waiting until the last possible moment to implement work for example - it was often the case that one would be spend a day doing mostly nothing and then around 2-4pm suddenly be given multiple, often conflicting tasks which had to be done that evening across multiple sites. There was no actual proper planning of work throughout the upcoming months, weeks or even days as project management would often spring their surprise requests at the last moment. Often it was only their in depth and intensive change management system which kept what were often multiple and conflicting work requests from crashing into one another in one almighty heap. It was also the case that if you were due to travel to a site to specifically perform one time consuming task you would find project manager after project manager coming to your desk with their own requests so it was often the case that you had too much work to do with not enough time to do it in. Other times it was the case that you didn't have any work to do at all. It was quite worrying when four or five days would pass without anything to do at all despite repeated requests for work. Also emails. So so so many emails. Its the Pico way to put everyone on every mailing list possible - even if it's ones covering work, changes and notifications from parts of Pico unrelated to your work or even region. Every day you'd have to wade through hundreds, often thousands, of emails ranging from power work notifications at Picos North American Datacenters (unrelated to Europe) to ticket notifications from teams in Asia (again, unrelated to Europe). This was deliberately done as a way of trying to make us check our emails properly but often it just meant that you'd miss important emails and tie up yet more time which could be spent, y'know, actual work or fixing Picos awful record on information sharing and collaboration. Egos : As one previous reviewer points out, big projects get doled out to young and inexperienced "20 year old" project managers. It's kind of like that - there are a couple of young guys who have been there since the UK office opened, been promoted waaaaayyy above where they should be at their age and get put on a huge pedestal for all to worship throughout Pico despite not actually doing all that much. A lot of the senior staff, project management and engineers have varying levels of egos boosted to a degree by the bigger salaries and square mile "just get it done" macho mentality. This tends to lead to a lot of politicking, gossiping and double dealing. Someone can spend half the day being nice to you and the other half sabotaging your work load. Chinese whispers deliberately feeding back to your manager is common. Disorganised systems at work: Pico's ability to effectively create, organise and share internal company information - vital everyday information such as site location and contract info, escalation matrixes for vendors and service providers Pico use to provide their service, etc - was severely lacking and as a result it was often very hard to get the information needed to perform your job. Often it was the case that procedure or methods of work were unwritten or hidden on someone's personal network share and could change weekly without clear cross team or group agreement. When challenged to codify and write down procedure and rules it was asserted that "you should *know* these procedures already". There was patently no desire to fix these failings and an immature obsession with doing stuff on the fly which is where a lot of their issues stem from. There are currently three platforms where documentation is held along with a decent DCIM system for datacenter and device information. All four systems were often out of date and inaccurate and there was never time to adequately update it. There was also no clear direction over which platform should take precedence and no clear plan over what is going to be migrated to where and how it is going to be organised. There was no joined plan to create an accessible, clear and concise portal for information. Teams and individuals seem to be very possessive over information and often when one offered to help organise things was told not to and that "everything will eventually be migrated over to Sharepoint." And that would be that even though no clear ETA was given. In the end you'd just write stuff down in your own notepad and never share your working because apparently collaboration is bad and shows a lack of commitment to the Pico way. Pico uses an established ticketing system but there was no clear direction over who owned what ticket. There was an expectation - not written down in a clear procedure, surprise surprise - that you should update tickets when you can but also confusion over what updates were acceptable. Conflicting expectations. ---- Management issues and work ethic: Was quite surprised from the interview to everyday work that certain management figures had deep involvement in areas *way* way outside of their realm of expertise - HR for example - and that they had very chummy relationships with certain members of staff. There was also multiple cases of senior staff micro-managing what should be every day break fix or change work when really they should be delegating that to the staff they've hired at great expense. Saw immediately that if you weren't playing squash or five-a-side football and engaging in regular chat with certain management figures then you weren't going to get anywhere. And if they turned hostile towards you then there wasn't all that much one could do. It was quite often that they would collate issues or previous missteps at work over a period of months into one long dossier which they could confront you with - even if you had acknowledged and dealt with such issues with management previously. Finally there was always a battle to try and control the constant game of Chinese whispers which would be going on to undermine teams or even individuals. There was always a lot of gossiping going on and for those who were often out of the office it was harder for them to control the flow of "fake news". It was often the case that you found yourself in the HR office trying to convince management that you were committed to your job and that whatever rumour was floating around the office was absolutely false. For example at Pico you are expected to work late and also on weekends if necessary so any insinuation that you weren't doing that could be fatal to your job prospects. Another "red flag" to management that you weren't committed to the Pico cause was asking for more than 7 days holiday at a time. Those who did go for 2 weeks on holiday and actually declared that in the office would elicit looks of surprise, suspicion and a rapid invitation to the HR office to explain themselves. There was often the very implicit insinuation that if you wanted to take more than 7 days holiday that you simply didn't have the commitment they were looking for.