PRTM Management Reviews in Mountain View, CA

Pros

Smart but down to earth people, collaborative and relatively flat work culture, high quality/high impact client work, on the rise -- growing rapidly.

Cons

Operational, sometimes tactical work
Narrow expertise and skill set (the firm is actively working on changing this)
Limited name recognition
Average compensation (relative to larger consulting firms)
Work culture becoming more competitive
Becoming more of an up or out firm

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on more strategic work
Diversify capabilities and skill set
Invest in improving brand awareness
Strive to maintain a collaborative work culture

Pros

Wide industry presence. Tactical. Opportunity to travel extensively.

Cons

No C level interactions. Consultants are very overworked and the compensation not on par with other consulting firms. More focus on staff augmentation versus strategic consulting.

Advice to Senior Management

Practice what you preach. Don't sell the firm's work-life balance philosophy when it is clearly not true. Give out better bonuses. Focus on selling at the C level.

Pros

Great general management experience. good opportunities to learn about different industries. Decent work/life balance for a consulting firm. Work with lots of smart people.

Cons

Few promotions in the last few years. Travel (although that is a given for consulting)

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on both practice area IP development in addition to NBD/sales.

Pros

PRTM is a very results-oriented Firm with a good reputation with clients (who know them). Directors are very hands-on and have strong technical, functional and industry expertise. There are some politics of course but overall a decent work environment.

Cons

PRTM does not have the branding and investment appetite to be a major management consulting firm with global scale. Thirty years and still without the scale to compete head on with the big boys. Growth in 2010 and 2011 will be flat or moderate at best. The result: longer hours, poor work-life balance, fewer promotions and limited upside for non-Directors.

Advice to Senior Management

You need to be more transparent with employees and adopt a longer-term view if you really want to grow the business.

Pros

I'd say PRTM has a collaborative culture, with a plenty of nice people. I truly enjoyed interacting with the people I've worked with at PRTM. The pay is better than corporate jobs' pay, but not comparable to other consulting firms.

Cons

PRTM has tons of average people, with quite mediocre capabilities. You'll have to love processes to enjoy the work at PRTM; this is what PRTM does and is good at. The firm will never reach the status of McKinsey and BCG, primarily because it attracts average, risk-averse talent. Pay is worse than the industry; for example, as a Pricinple, you make on average less than $200K/year, while at BCG you make around $350K. And then the work is tedious, because it's all process (not content) focused.
If you're serious about management consulting, skip PRTM. It just doesn't pay off in the long run.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on hiring and attracting top talent if you want to grow; don't recruit from third-tier business schools, and focus more on C-level topics (strategy).

Pros

Good firm if you want to focus on Supply Chain Operations. You get experience in running the operations of companies especially the Program Management aspects of it. Also it is a very open firm with easy access to Partners. I met some truly exceptional consultants.

Cons

Lack of name recognition. During client engagements, most employees had not heard about PRTM. In many instances client employees asked whether it was a contracting firm. PRTM is notorious for lack of organized training. If you are lucky enough to be on a good project with an experienced Partner you will learn a lot. It was very difficult for me to find previous work or intellectual property I could leverage for client work. As a result, I had to rely on the web or reinvent again. I didn't see a lot of fresh thinking or truly ground breaking intellectual capital come out of the firm. That may be a result of the culture where every Partner is so focused on client delivery that true intellectual property is not developed. I saw come proposals that used material from proposals developed 10-15 years ago.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on training and skills development of consultants.

Pros

The impact of the work delivered to clients is visible and you feel like you're gaining skills that will be useful later in life. The Directors are very supportive of family life and rarely ask you to work on the weekends. The monthly in person staff meetings really helped tie everyone together with a sense of community. The client list was really top notch, and the level of senior executive client interaction was very high, even from the moment I joined the firm. The project responsibilities I was given from day one were remarkably impactful and I felt like a contributor to a client's success right away.

Cons

The biggest issue I saw was with compensation. If you got a mid year promotion, you didn't get a pay raise until the end of the year, which was actually very disheartening. Compensation at the top level is not really known outside of the Directorship and it made it hard to know what the carrot was. There was a lot of speculation at the Associate level on salary increases and potential at the other levels, but people were very tight lipped about compensation overall. Surprisingly, for what a data driven company PRTM is, when it came to performance reviews, there was no data provided to me for why I got what I got.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more transparent on salaries and bonuses. Continue results driven approach

Pros

One of the best of the consultancy firms. Not too large, not too small. Produces good results for clients. Highly respected.

Cons

Your happiness is more influenced by your particular project / responsible partner than at other firms.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate more openly. Spread the wealth more to consultants. Reduce internal workload to a greater degree

Pros

Great place to learn about how to run a business. PRTM focuses on Operations Strategy, meaning how do you run your business to meet your strategic goals. You will get to see a lot of different industries and learn the best ways to solve high level problems. Great reputation among clients.

Cons

Travel of course. Also, somewhat of a slave to the economy - when things are going well, consulting is great, when business slows down, it gets pretty stressful. This is the same for all consulting firms though. While PRTM does great work, it does not have a broad reputation outside of product development and supply chain clients. Many people who leave PRTM go to prior clients because they really understand what we do, otherwise it is difficult to get people to understand what you've done since they haven't heard of PRTM.

Advice to Senior Management

More communication is always better. They are getting better at it than they were a few years ago. Try to be more creative in getting more business other than just saying to try to sell more.

Pros

Meaningful work- I feel that the project work I do makes a differenec to the client and that we really earn our billing rates
Translates well if/when you leave consulting- If I move to industry I will be doing the same kind of work so it is good training in a way
Get to be industry focused- dont have to work in an industry where I have no interest

Cons

No time for anything else- 12 to 15 hour days are the norm. Doesnt work with family and a need for doing something other than work all day/weekend
Many clients have little respect for your work- Since we are doing hands no work, many times clients (not the ones who hire us, but the ones we work with daily) seem to think we are program managers. Our value add far exceeds that- but it is hard to convince people of that

Advice to Senior Management

Be more open, communicate more
Manage recruiting/downsizing better