PA Consulting Reviews

Pros

Holidays – have the liberty of enjoying more holidays than the school children! This will certainly help those who always wished to drop their kids off to school!
Free Food (sometimes drinks) – apart from daily freebies such as juice, coffee and tea every month brings in one free lunch. If the top heads from UK are about one might as well get a few cans of beer and coke!
Free phone – an ISD enabled phone is just an elbow away. There are no usage rules so one can make calls to customer service and yell at them for no reason. If above a certain level might even get an all paid blackberry so one can enjoy international roaming even during personal trips seamlessly!
Made in UK stationary – enjoy carrying around pens, notebooks, name tags, staplers, laptops, backpacks mouse pads, etc. All imported from the UK!
Made for working woman – married or not this is the temple for working woman. Go find your peace of mind between 9:30 to 6:00!
Made for businessmen – for gents disappointed by reading above – mint money by stock trading, discussing futures and running off your other business!
Made for each other – well a few have even found their soul mates!
Onsite perks - If you are at client site you are on paid honeymoon!
Work from anywhere – be in park or movies or Delhi or Dubai. One can work from anywhere for months together! If you have good rapport you can go on vacation and come back to claim you were working from vacation. Earn compensatory days and go on another vacation!

Cons

Old school – One may be reminded of the school days, if you had a head mistress you know what I am talking about – time in time out is a must keep, no matter what they teach or what class work you are given you ought be at desk all the time! If not be ready for the e-mail punishment. Somehow they want to be ‘strict’ and are so ‘partial’ to their ‘favourite’.
Super Managers – One may think the managers are cool while working with them, but just before you decided to join PA you have been trapped already! Be assured you are being watched and will be taunted with funny e-mails at regular intervals. Somehow they think they are excellent managers.
Legacy Systems – Not just the managers but everything one can spot is technically out dated. This includes classic Windows XP, five years old and yet working laptops, time card, expenses, internal portal etc. But somehow they manage to have it all running.
Pay scales – For the kind of work they want high profiled consultants to do, they do NOT really pay well. Not that they can’t as a few old timers make the most. Since bonus depends on CTC and the most uttered buzzword ‘utilization’ the low paid crowd can only afford to buy a few extra toffies. Somehow they still manage to recruit new faces for lesser.
Utilization – what is it really? One wouldn’t hear unless on-boarded and learn a lesson until the first appraisal. Although the managers know how to work around they will not share any tips (not even share-trading tips). Utilizing the ‘utilization’ factor they manage to do a lot of cost cutting.
Clients – They are thoroughly billed and a high value system is built which is usually a mega failure. Sometimes client fight can be heard throughout the office. Yet they manage to sell some more work.
Asking rates – Consider the recent UID project bid of Rs 510 million. Somehow they manage to put together an enormous quote!
Training and Development – No expenses in this area absolutely. While those in the US, UK spend sufficient time in development for Indian consultants will work towards utilization. A five day training course in the UK will be trimmed down to two or something like that when done in India. Somehow they manage to ignore the benefits of training.

Advice to Senior Management

- Give everyone of who is left, the much deserved hike. Not sure what sense letting every superstar go followed by big time fresh face recruitment will do.
- Fix problems when they are first spotted. When it is know there are local management issues, nothing was done to rectify but it was made evident that nothing will be done. And people were just let go. Not talking about the ‘passenger dropping’ that happened in 2009.
- Shut down all meaningless branches at a faster pace than you are. If one branch has to go down every time there is strategy remix, i.e every six months why not make lives easy for all. Use your own TDT style?
- Make use of the internal survey responses gathered every six months. If consultants words are valued one bit, you are at a different level.
- Show some respect to the back office people who really are adding huge revenue in GBP. Do not disappoint them with pathetic bonuses or dumping the 'utilization' burden. They aren't the selling crowd and nor even responsible to do so. But they ensure your work is extended from time to time.
- Learn from what is preached to PA clients. Management Consulting is best preached when followed.
- Training and Career development aren’t only for those in UK, US.

Pros

Good people
Remuneration gets better once the three year delayed bonus kicks in

Cons

No clear strategy
Huge over-reliance on UK Public Sector
Too many senior people who don't know how to sell
Loosing good people by the dozen

Advice to Senior Management

Define a clear strategy that is more than just bongo drums and catchphrases. We need to see actual targets for profit, turnover, staff.

Start re-building the relationship with staff.

Pros

Good place for self starters
Nice people and generally good teams
Freedom to develop your own brand and business
Employe owned

Cons

Lacking management and clear direction
Too much focus on public sector over the last year
Communication to staff is dreadful - even though they own the company

Advice to Senior Management

The company needs a clear steer and some tough decisions will need to be made to turn PA around. Communication needs to improve considerably to keep high performers.

Pros

Good place to learn the aspects of management consulting

Cons

Opportunities are limited in terms of business areas

Advice to Senior Management

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Pros

The people you work with are all intelligent and friendly. If you're proactive, you can find people to learn from. There is a variety of projects and you can push to go on the projects that you are interested in as long as you make it known how eager you are.

Cons

The structure of the company and the senior management make it very hard to work collaboratively and to get recognition and support. Unfairness exists in reward structures and not enough emphasis is placed on developing the workforce in a tailored fashion - one size does not fit all.

Advice to Senior Management

Re-engage with the workforce

Pros

1) Nice colleagues, specially A-PC level
2) Business transparency (EIS)

Cons

1) Lack of long-term strategy and direction to grow business
2) Incentive system not promoting collaboration
3) No "great place to work" culture

Advice to Senior Management

Address cons...

Pros

Good place to work, encouraged to follow your personal interests

Cons

Can be political but no more so than any other firm, very utilisation driven performance management. Sometimes internal efforts are overshadowed by utilisation.

Advice to Senior Management

Speed up the recruitment process!

Pros

Abitily to build your own career in the areas you want to develop in.
Lots of clients based in and around London so limited travel

Cons

Can be long hours
Heavily dependant on Government sector working

Advice to Senior Management

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Pros

* Quick growth from lower ranks
* Great people
* Interesting work
* Can choose to do certain kinds of work
* Very bottom line driven

Cons

* Total rewards structure is not on par with market
* Not much support in moving up/ expanding horizons - line management is non-standard
* Promotions are sometimes a bit 'uneven'
* Very bottom line driven !

Advice to Senior Management

* Ease up on the organizational red tape
* Keep up with technology
* Make diversity - in consultant experiences, in people development, in leadership roles a key aspect of development
* Invest in your people - external training, fair compensation
* Make the place a bit more fun - and yes, it is a bit more fun when we win, when we grow
* Stronger branding is necessary - esp. in non-UK geographies

Pros

* everybody treats each other as equals
* friendly environment
* exposure to a wide number or projects allows you to build diverse experiences

Cons

* success only comes with networking
* promotion seems to be a political game at times
* during the recession, they made redundancies that nobody expected
* promotion and success depends on you being sold onto projects which ultimately isn't in your hands. the managers at PA need to sell projects for you to work on.

Advice to Senior Management

* develop the brand further through advertising and PR
* get out of the financial services sector
* trust emloyees more, reduce admin and rules