Davies Group IT – Total Management Incompetency Throughout - Senior Systems Engineer Davies Employee Review

From both a technology and management point of view this company is a disaster. The IT department budget seems very small relative to the work that is taken on. It is clear that the IT department is not valued at all and is just funded as an after-thought compared to the other areas of the business. I was quite appalled by how several so called ‘senior’ employees and even directors would frequently rudely cut across people on Teams calls in an arrogant and patronising tone, and then stroll around the office with a seeming aura of superiority. Lengths of service and internal company politics clearly take precedence over actual skills. I soon learned that the Group CEO has a well-known reputation for being a notorious womaniser, which basically reflects the working environment for the whole company. Every C-level member and subsidiary company director seems to have their own female PA as a glorified babysitter. Directors claim they are always ‘so busy’ because they are pretending their stimmed out business lunches and conference meetings are ‘work’. Rumours of senior management ‘liking their ladies‘, ‘liking a drink’ and taking illegal substances are rife, and from what I witnessed are all accurate. The company IT service desk I worked within is a complete travesty. Top level management from areas of the business you have never heard of are only too happy to continuously call and spam message you with a ‘do you know who I am’ attitude to demand an immediate change be done, undercutting all formal processes. This causes a situation akin to too many cooks, with no clear prioritisation that ultimately means lower level workers can never get the proper IT support fixes they need. People are literally shouting down the phone at you for unremitting issues such as they can’t open a claim file on the outdated bespoke software, or their outlook email isn’t working due to badly coded plugins. All of the negative trustpilot reviews from frustrated customers reflect this. Another review mentioned how the company has grown too big too quickly and simply hasn’t got the basics right. This is spot on. It quickly became obvious to me that Davies Group puts profits and acquisitions above everything else, and then they have the absolute audacity to post on social networking sites about how having a happy and efficient workforce matters. They even sell consultancy on this to other companies! The hypocrisy here is outrageous!! The project management and IT department management are basically led by a group of middle-aged women making technical decisions they don’t fully understand the implications of. People have clearly just been hired here due to desperation, favouritism, or to fulfil a hiring quota. They are all more obsessed with their office ‘social standing’ and being written about as a PR story in the company newsletter, rather than getting actual work done to a good standard. The executive level leadership are no better. During my relatively short time here I’d heard that multiple external consultants had been brought in to assess the state of things, none of which I believe could report anything different than what the long suffering ground level employees already knew. I lost all respect for the leadership as it became clear the top management are out of their depth with managing the company acquisitions, and hence they are blindly following the consultant’s recommendations to justify their actions and cover their own personal backsides, passing the blame downhill on all decisions made if they then went wrong (which they frequently did). They clearly don’t value or trust the opinions of their actual IT staff. You are being paid to just ‘do’ and not to ‘think’ as such. On the technology side of things almost everything is outdated, with firmware upgrades, patching, SLAs and documentation all non-existent and non-compliant. Having extensive previous experience of working in IT teams, I was absolutely SHOCKED by the levels of incompetency shown by members of staff here, at all levels, with seemingly no desire to change the overall ground level way of working. The only changes made were adding ever increasing hierarchies of pointless management-orientated roles. At one point I had four people who weren’t my bosses but acted like my bosses, whom I frequently had to have ‘check-in’ meetings with. Of particular note was incorrect prioritisation and delegation of workloads by middle level managers. Key tasks such as configuration of client accounts, permissions and network settings are being given to teenagers working their first ever job, and when this is inevitably done incorrectly it is never fixed until several months later after a series of further phone calls and tickets from the disgruntled clients. However, I could see that the directors and upper management were the true cause of the majority of problems. For example, the company is in the process of adopting Microsoft Azure, however no training has been provided, resulting again in almost all cloud infrastructure not being configured correctly and constant delays to projects which compounds into even more pressure on you as a ground level IT worker. The whole experience is like working on a house of cards, where it would just be quicker to knock it all down and start again, yet you can’t as that would mean a documented small delay to the project roadmap, which in most cases would be a lesser evil that incompetent business analysts simply don’t comprehend, or more specifically they don’t want to do the ‘work’ to explain these problems to stakeholders as it’s like pulling teeth. Security is also pathetic to a point where I strongly believe Davies Group is gambling with the safety of its client’s data. When I expressed major concerns around permissions they were casually dismissed, and I was specifically instructed not to escalate these concerns further with their small cyber security team, as this would have meant additional delays to the project. One manager all but admitted that they have frequently been asked to lie to the auditors in order to achieve professional accreditations. They have invested in some vulnerability scanners and are prioritising guarding against phishing attacks, but once again no training on how to use these tools was provided and nothing is actively monitored, so for the majority of common vulnerabilities due diligence is simply non-existent. All very embarrassing for what is continuously stressed as being an ‘enterprise level’ business. Yet top management are only too happy to continue burying their heads in the sand, sharing screenshots of IT systems they don’t even know how to use and trying to pretend everything is hunky dory. All of the company acquisitions they keep making sound great, until you realise that most of them are just single business units in remote places consisting of just a handful of people. Yet despite this the integration projects take forever because of all the above mentioned issues. It is clear the whole business is frustrated with the group IT service desk, resulting in the feeling of ‘here we go again’ every time you login to your PC in the morning. The company growth strategy is obviously to create an illusion to other businesses of how professional and successful they are, when behind the scenes the reality is completely different. Across the organisation it is obvious people have been promoted into positions out of convenience, instead of out of actual skill, resulting in nobody really knowing what they are doing and every middle manager seemingly looking downwards for people beneath them to both advise and do their own work for them to prop them up and make them look good. You basically have to manage your own boss alongside doing your day job. On the few occasions tasks were completed, I observed project managers were then only too happy to take all the credit in the form of executive email chains and celebratory ceremony meetings, sharing no recognition down to the ground level team. I must also note that on several occasions while working in the office I overheard conversations about ‘outsourcing resources’, and I’d heard that multiple specialist teams of people have been made redundant in recent years. Clearly the company investors are trying to fiddle with the organisation structure and the accounting books to try and make it look as good on paper as possible. Having endured all of this I was not surprised to then learn from others that pay raises and personal objectives were also non-existent, not just for IT but for pretty much every department of the company. By non-existent, I mean you ‘could get’ a (frankly insulting) 1% raise, or even ‘upto’ 1.5% if you accumulate a lot of kudos points, and all personal objectives if done at all were done on a whim retrospectively. If you are desperate for a job and are thinking of joining then I would advise negotiating a strong initial starting salary because of this. It seems the management excuses consistently vary between ‘we haven’t got the time’, ‘there is no budget’ and ‘we don’t have anyone to backfill your role’. This is all despite the company having a strong covid period due to health insurance claims skyrocketing. I cannot see this changing anytime soon due to the department ground level being severely understaffed and with the majority of existing IT staff not being trained enough to fulfil their roles effectively, including the IT management themselves. Of course, they never tell you any of the above in the interview. They just waxed lyrical about how exciting all their acquisitions are and how several people have been ‘promoted’ (job title change with no real pay increase) multiple times in the last few years due to department re-shuffling. Davies Group are clearly desperate to hire more staff to do the actual work at ground level, while incompetent middle management chortle away on their company phones and stuff their faces on business buffets. It seems they take on anyone who knows the basics but then treat everyone like just a number once you do join. Talent is clearly not valued and any talented IT individuals similar to myself will quickly become frustrated by this and want to move on. I have very generously not given one star because I do believe given the right decisions things can slowly be turned around here, and I have nothing bad personally to say against any of the team I partook in. All of the issues come down to years of an incorrectly fostered company culture. There could be a stable job for life in it somewhere if you’re willing to worm your way into being ‘one of the guys’ or ’one of the girls’, or are one of the few fortunate to be under the right line management and are happy just fumbling along. However, as things are today I would definitely not recommend joining Davies Group. I don’t believe the company is as financially stable as they make out due to the redundancies and all the loans it has taken out for business acquisitions. There is zero true career progression and their IT department is currently a sinking ship.