Stay away from BT the Cost Transformation team
Pros
Considered as "Elite" team in BT and a launch pad for talented individuals into the senior leadership positions. Pay is on par with management consulting
Cons
There are several issues in the team: 1. Type of work: The team is predominantly involved in cost reduction projects through headcount reduction, organisation restructuring, offshoring, outsourcing etc. The team is focussed narrowly on cost reduction with little regard to customer satisfaction, quality and service delivery aspects. They use limited set of tools such as Overhead value analysis, management spans and layers to identify cost reduction opportunities. A recent internal employee survey highlighted the "mundane" nature of their work. The majority of work is desk bound with conference calls as a preferred way of reaching out to people to collect data/information. The project deadlines are unrealistic which put a lot of pressure on project teams which affect the quality. Although they claim to be data driven in their approach, but the quality of the data itself is questionable. This leads to lots of revisions in final recommendations. 2. Team culture: The senior leadership openly promotes "Survival of the fittest" culture pitting team members against each other. There is no honesty, and transperancy in performance management system. Performance management is based on the perception of few and powerful people. This creates a lot insecurity within the team and toxic work environment. People are afraid to speak up during team meetings about the issues. There is a blame culture for failures without understanding the root causes. This work culture is similar to that of other parts of BT. There are loads of negative reviews on BT's performance management system on Glassdoor. They use outdated forced distribution system to identify poor performers. There is a high attrition rate in the Cost Transformation team because of unfair and unjust performance management. 3. Cost Transformation senior leadership: The team leadership is arrogant and highly political. They boast of their team as world class and best in class team. Too much focus on cost short term cost reduction and they are more interested in hitting their targets than building truly high performing team with open and transparent work culture.
