Pros

You are given a lot more flexibility on how you develop and deliver services than at other large consulting firms.
Culture is pretty good - depends on which office but there is generally not a great deal of politics or drama among fieldwork teams.
Access to wide range of clients

Cons

Protiviti has never shaken off the audit mentality of Arthur Andersen. Most non-audit services are reliant on one or two very smart people somewhere in the company. If they leave, the service lines that they led significantly suffer.

As a subsidiary of Robert Half International, Protiviti has significantly suffered in the last year from the short term mentality of an organization where people are interchangable. Here's a news flash - for RHI management. Consulting is a relationship driven business, and when the people go, the business often goes with them or gets rebid.

Very little effort has been made to streamline internal operations. Some of the processes that line managers have to cope with (from rev-rec to setting up a job code) seem designed to take as long as possible. This lack of investment in improving internal operations has knock on effects into the way that knowledge is shared. While the new Protiviti Knowledge and Innovation Center is a step in the right direction - it has an uphill battle to change the existing mindset.

Advice to Senior Management

Work out what you want to be good at and ensure that you have the delivery capabilities to execute on these things. Don't make solutions specialists do SOX for months on end. This will only result in turnover, and unsatisfied clients.

Don't think that you can compete with the Big 4 on everything. You don't have the capacity or bench to do this any more and often it puts people in a difficult position when having to explain that we will have to fly our closest expert from thousands of miles away to compete against a local resource from another firm.

Most of all - either convince RHI management that Protiviti should be run in a different way from the staffing divisions, or push to be spun off so that you can control your own destiny.