03 December 2024

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Welcome back to KnowPro’s Consultancy Market Intelligence Newsletter!

I know that you don’t have a team of BD analysts helping you navigate consultancy trends or your growth strategy, so if there are datapoints or angles that you'd like us to explore (on the house) then do let me know!

You can book a time to speak with me here!

Ejaaz (Founder & Editor at KnowPro Market Intelligence)

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Last Week’s Public Sector Activity

Last week, we tracked 19 consultancy-related contract awards (across business, tech and change consulting), valued at an aggregate of £3.7M. This is one of the lowest-activity weeks we’ve seen for a while, and correlates with a winding down of activity as we approach the Christmas break.

Here were the top Government Departments and Large Public Bodies that awarded consulting-related contracts, ranked by award value 👇

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This month, there were only 2 government departments that awarded consultancy-related contracts, both of which were £100k and below in contract value. The vast majority of contracts awarded were by large sub-government agencies and public bodies. Most of these contracts had an engineering focus with associated technical and project management requirements.

Elsevier, a global health and scientific information & analytics company, was awarded a contract to undertake a report of China’s capabilities. The scope is unclear, but KnowPro's research team is looking into the details of this initiative.

KPMG was awarded a contract by the CQC to review its regulatory transformation platform. This builds on KPMG’s record of delivering technology implementation (especially Microsoft-focused), for the CQC.

Aside from KPMG’s CQC award, no other Big 4 or blue-chip consultancies received any contract awards.

Top Consultancy Providers

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Upcoming Public Sector Contracts Tracker

Here are a list of interesting consultancy-related contracts that are due to close by the 23rd of December 🚀

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Last Week’s M&A Activity

There wasn't much activity in the consultancy M&A space last week, but we did track a sustained trend of mid-size business interest in smaller firms.

• Ten10, an IT consulting and talent development firm, has acquired The Scale Factory, an AWS Partner. The Scale Factory brings over 20 staff members to Ten10’s existing team of more than 250 employees. This acquisition strengthens Ten10’s position in the cloud computing and capabilities in DevOps and automation.

• BGF, one of the largest growth capital investors in the UK and Ireland, invested £7 million into ITC Service, a North East-based IT managed services provider. ITC Service supports over 400 SMEs across the North East with services including managed IT support, cyber security and digital transformation.

• Change and digital transformation consultancy, Cambridge Management Consulting, acquired cofinitive, a corporate communications consultancy with 3 employees. This marks an interesting change in CMC’s trajectory and indicates a focus on expanding its services into a wider-ranging professional services firm.

• HR People Support, a People & HR consultancy based in Gloucestershire, has acquired the HR support division of HR Champions, a provider of HR services and leadership and management training in the UK.

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🪓 Deloitte cuts 180 from its UK advisory practice

Affects employees working across Strategy, Risk & Transactions and Technology & Transformation

Context

• In March 2024, Deloitte launched its most significant reorganisation in a decade by reducing it’s UK business units from 5 to 4
• Follows earlier layoffs this year: February 2024 saw 100 UK employees cut, and a few months ago a further 250 advisory staff were cut </aside>

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Q3 Tech Consulting Executive Moves

We regularly update our data sources for consultancy-specific executive moves and are adding more data streams weekly.

We tracked 53 tech consulting executive moves across UK-based firms in Q3. Here’s what we found 👇

Executive Talent Flows per Quarter (Q4 analysed up to 30th November)

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• Based on our dataset of c.172 moves tracked since the start of the year, Q3 saw the second largest number of IT-related executive moves, marginally behind Q2.

• Of the 53 executive moves and promotions recorded in November, 32 (60%) were promotions.

The firms that promoted the most (Q3)

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• Of these 32 promotions PwC was the highest-promoting employer in Q3 with 17 promotions made. The average tenure of each executive promotion was roughly 3 years.
• An aggregate of 20 moves were reported at Director-level, with a further 12 being at Partner & MD level

The firms that poached the most from other firms (Q3)

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• Accenture, which acquired data consultancy Red Kite last December, integrated 7 Red Kite executives into it’s main franchise during Q3.
• EY saw a total of 5 tech consulting poaches, 2 of which were from Deloitte.
• Deloitte saw 3 tech consulting executive departures, while IBM saw 2 departures in Q3. </aside>