PwC Is Shuffling Deck Chairs on the SS Advisory, Plans to Hire Rather Than Fire

WSJ had some good scoop on PwC yesterday: the firm is shaking things up in consulting. The long and short of it:

PricewaterhouseCoopers is overhauling the structure of its U.S. advisory business and hiring for thousands of roles as it sees recovering demand for such services.

The firm told workers Tuesday it plans to expand its advisory divisions to eight from four to provide more industry-specific services to companies, effective July 1. It also will embed managed services—in which consultants operate part of a client’s business, such as information technology and human resources—in each of the divisions as opposed to keeping that group separate.

Last year around this time PwC announced they would be “aligning” their “organizational structure” firmwide (usually not a good sign, any kind of restructuring in a time of low demand is no bueno) and, presumably as part of this, ditched some words from leadership’s excessively long job titles. They trimmed their service lines down to three — Assurance, Tax and Advisory — “to better serve client needs, their buying patterns and the market.”

As explained by WSJ, PwC’s advisory business currently consists of these four areas: deals; cyber, risk and regulation; technology and business modernization; and managed services. Under the new structure, cyber will split into two: cyber privacy and tech risk; and overall risk and regulation. Tech transformation is the one getting the biggest makeover and will morph into five sections: front-office consulting (marketing and customer service are two examples given by WSJ); industry-specific strategy; supply chain; traditional finance and human resources; and cloud engineering and data analytics.

Deals will stay deals.

In the article we get some current numbers on advisory partners and employees in the US: about 36,000, 15,000 of which are in India. This is the important bit:

The firm said no layoffs are planned as part of the reorganization, and it is hiring for thousands of advisory roles, citing optimism around recovering demand for advisory services.

No info is given on how many of those roles will be onshore. Better keep a close eye on it and stay alert for increased performance plans.

Is consulting back? We, and PwC, will have to wait and see.

PwC Overhauls U.S. Advisory Arm, Boosts Hiring to Offer More Industry-Specific Services [WSJ]