basic salary - no benefits - Project Manager Paper Leaf Employee Review

Thanks for taking time out of your day to leave a review. It’s important for us as a company to receive, listen to, and address feedback from all employees. I’m glad you feel that Paper Leaf is full of great people who are always trying to help. Those are the people we try to hire across the board, and I think we’ve done a good job at that too. However, I agree that we’re not perfect and yes, we have areas to improve on. To your points: > “crazy work overload of employees. There are too much work and it expected to be done very fast.” While I don’t think we’ve 100% nailed the formula, I do have to disagree with the framing of PL as somewhere with “crazy work overload”. In the first 6 months of this year, the average employee is on pace to bank 1.9 days / year. That would indicate that workload is reasonable. Further, we do our best to manage workload by having a work week under 35 hours, having employees lead the estimation of their own work for fairness and accuracy, and using a resource planner to ensure we’re only booking each person to 27 hours in a week (leaving a full day for unknowns and ad-hoc client requests). All that said, the system isn’t perfect and there are moments where we need to turn stuff around quickly, or estimates are off and work is lengthier to complete than anticipated. I hear you on that front. We’re constantly tracking this data and refining our process for accuracy, because believe me: we don’t want to work overtime for free any more than you do. Clients do expect us to deliver work at a good pace; it’s part of the expectation of being a high-performing digital product shop. However, most of our projects span 4-12 months, and we hit most deadlines with little overtime, so the data would say that we’re scoping fairly accurately from a macro sense. That said, I’m sorry you felt overworked; that is not the type of company I set out to create, so I’ll look again into our systems for areas to improve. > “not clear tasks with very short deadlines. So you will waste a lot of time just on trying to figure out what should be done. That leads to bad code and projects that are very hard to handle.” I agree that sometimes tasks and work requests that come from clients and project managers could use some increased clarity. It’s tough to nail that every time. Our project teams do their own discoveries and create their own user stories and associated work plans, but perhaps more coaching and oversight is required to ensure those work plans are understandable, feasible and not overly optimistic. I’ll look into this more. > “very hight expectations of the skill set you need to have. If you don't have you it you are expected to learn it in hours.” You’re right in that we do have high expectations here. It comes with the territory and aligns with our core values, and our clients’ expectations of us and the work we produce. I wouldn’t say we have unreasonable expectations, but there have definitely been moments where we’ve asked too much from a more entry-level employee or misjudged the skillset of someone we’ve hired. That’s on us. Thankfully, we’ve taken a few big strides in recent years to improve in these areas. In 2020 we rolled out job bands & levels which greatly clarified expectations between a Developer (Level 1) and a Developer (Level 5), which has helped us set clear and collaborative expectations with our team and also provide a clear track for progression and promotion within the company. We’ve also overhauled our new employee onboarding process, which is extended out over multiple months with a slow ramp up in work scope and complexity. These two particular items have been met with praise from both new and long-term employees. The next step for us is rolling out an improved PD plan – a strategic goal from our management team for this year based directly on employee feedback – which will allow for employees to learn more skills they’ll need down the road. > “get ready to handle 5-6 different projects during one day.” If you’re part of our Ongoing Solutions team, which is tasked with infrastructure and support for our ongoing clients, you can definitely touch 5-6 different products in one day. That work is smaller in scope, so there is naturally more volume and more ad-hoc requests. For our focused product teams, 5-6 projects in a day would be a sign of a prioritization issue to be addressed. Teams on larger projects largely have control over their weeks and days and how they structure their work, which they plan with their team in their weekly meeting and daily standups. Looking at our resource planner right now, our 3 product teams have an average of 3-4 staggered projects at any one time, of varying size & complexity. I would love to get this down to 2-3, which is a reasonable goal that we’ve been working towards by scaling project size so we can decrease project volume. > “prepare to work overtimes. Maybe it used to be different, but now work/life balance is not about PL. I know people who have been working 1 month without normal days off.” You’re right, sometimes overtime happens. Maybe the work was underscoped, maybe there were delays that caused a crunch at the end of the project – there’s a host of reasons why OT happens, but I agree: it isn’t great. That’s why we’ve designed the systems we have in place, mentioned above (re: employee work estimation, resource planning, shorter work week length, etc), to try our best to avoid this. Sometimes it still happens, and I’m sorry it happened to you. The data doesn’t show that working overtime is a problem – as indicated by the 1.9 days / year on average – but there could be some folks who are working overtime without speaking up about it or tracking that time for some reason. I appreciate you mentioning that; I’ll do some investigating. I’m sorry your time at Paper Leaf wasn’t up to your standards. I’ve always said I try to create the company I’d like to work for; I’ll keep striving for that and looking for areas to improve. 

Regards,
 
Jeff Archibald, 
Managing Director