Advisory Performance Summary
Advisory deliverers mostly positive results, driven by our focus on being client-centric, developing our people and embracing new technologies.
Advisory
Our vision is to create value for our firm, our people, and our clients across Africa by delivering strategy-led, asset-backed solutions. Despite tough economic conditions and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we realised this by delivering quality and value to our clients, achieving excellent people engagement, and delivering excellent performance and improved profitability across our business.
Highlights
- Launch and execution of our Global Connected Execution strategy
- Implementation of key foundational elements, including digital platforms, integrated solutions, Activation Hub, Experience Centre
- Rollout of key propositions such as Fit for Growth, Value Creation and Perform+
- Improved profitability amid tough economic conditions
- Maintaining high performance and energy through the COVID-19 crisis, which enabled us to largely meet/beat our ‘most likely’ financial targets
Financial results - revenue
Priorities
- Realising the benefits of Connected Execution
- Elevating our market presence, capturing market share, making the most of COVID-19 initiatives, strengthening alliances and emphasising our value narrative
- Closely managing our revenue, operations, clients, people and quality
Performance
The COVID-19 pandemic posed the most significant threat to our business this year, but we adapted extremely well to the change in circumstances. We have focused on helping our teams work together and by prioritising clear and transparent communication with all stakeholders — clients, partners, and staff — we have managed to maintain the momentum of the business through all levels of the national lockdown.
We’re especially proud of how our employees have responded to the additional support. Their feedback tells us that our communication, guidance and supervision, technology, and behaviours have enabled them to remain steady, engaged, productive and positive during this difficult time. By continuing to put our purpose and values at the centre of everything we do, we will ensure the sustainability of our practice beyond COVID-19.
Read more about our response to COVID-19 and our culture, purpose and values.
Delivering our strategy
- Quality
- Sharpening our market focus
- Being commercial
- Digitising our business
- Inspiring our people
- Greater societal purpose
Quality
The quality of our work across the full range of our services is a key focus, not only in terms of how best to test, measure and enhance quality, but also the levels of investment needed to ensure our quality is at the level we and our stakeholders expect. An example of how we manage quality is our convening Project Acceptance Panels for high risk and high value projects. These assess not only the risk, commercial and strategic aspects of a project, but also our ability to deliver quality and adhere to our brand values. Another example is a quality review programme, which includes in-flight reviews conducted during the project lifecycle to proactively manage quality and identify risks to be mitigated. In the year ahead we plan to further strengthen our in-flight review process, while also closely monitoring our risk and quality performance indicators.
Sharpening our market focus
This year we focused on three key areas:
- Connected Execution - This way of working aims to create genuine market differentiation by shaping our Advisory practice to deliver issues-led advice with asset-backed delivery. Advisory Connected Execution builds on what we have already been doing and provides a catalyst for greater alignment across Advisory, the firm, and the broader PwC network.
- Experience Centre - We advanced our Business eXperience Technology (BXT) capabilities with the launch of our Experience Centre at our Waterfall offices. Driven by creative, human-centered approach, this facility offers interactive technology and immersive spaces to differentiate our client experience with a new method of selling and delivering.
- Local Activation Hub - Our Local Activation Hub was created to be the sales pursuit facilitator for Advisory. The aim is to enable our teams to improve origination and proposal quality for strategic clients and target opportunities. By being a gateway to the global PwC network, the Hub will connect our teams to the best and most relevant capabilities to ensure the right pursuit strategy, solution and delivery model are assembled in order to win work
In the coming year we aim to further embed our Connected Execution strategy to mature the operating model and realise the benefits of a connected network of firms that realises tangible value for our clients.
Being commercial
We have been applying our minds to improving profitability by increasing revenue and improving engagement margins in order to increase Advisory’s contribution to the firm’s overall financial performance. We have also lowered the cost to deliver through improved partner and staff utilisation.
The year ahead will see us focusing on maturing operational excellence through increased consistency and discipline in the way we manage the business to create investment capacity and drive profitable growth.
Digitising our business
We have continued on our digital transformation journey to enable the business to bring greater value and a better experience to our people and clients.
This coming year, Advisory will be launching a cross-business operating systems (xBOS) reporting dashboard to present information for the entire Advisory engagement life cycle. xBOS Reporting is an integrated platform that brings together data from all our underlying BOS systems — Salesforce, Oracle and Workday — to deliver near real-time reporting on a host of performance metrics
Read more about our digital transformation.
Inspiring our people
The last year has been dominated by the action we’ve taken to support and communicate with our staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the situation starts to normalise, we’re focusing on proactive performance management, retention of top talent and making sure our people have the right skills and tools to work optimally. We are also refining our efforts to achieve our transformation and inclusion targets by recruiting through community initiatives such as the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, mentioned earlier.
Find out more about how we are inspiring our people.
Greater societal purpose
Building on the momentum of our social response to COVID-19 and our contribution to the Business for South Africa initiative, we are committed to continue sharing our expertise to bring about positive social change. We also plan to continue connecting our staff with initiatives that create meaningful societal impact in the three areas:
- Skills for society - We’re investing in our digital skills and solutions to help close gaps that prevent people from diverse backgrounds from joining the future workforce.
- Community - Our community engagements are designed to encourage staff donations and volunteerism in effort to empower our people to enrich the communities in which they live.
- Education and mentoring - Many of our staff participate in education and mentoring programmes, including PwC supported initiatives and external ones. Our aim is to raise awareness of these programmes and encourage greater participation by our people across the country.
Read more about how we’re living our societal purpose.
Explore our Integrated Report 2020
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