To address PwC’s staffing challenges, we created a digital staffing platform built on Certinia’s robust framework. This platform was not only customized to align with PwC’s brand style guidelines but also meticulously tailored to meet the organization’s specific functional requirements on staffing.

The UX team delivered a transformative digital platform that streamlined staffing processes and improved transparency across the organization. This solution addressed critical inefficiencies while enabling employees and leaders to operate with greater agility and collaboration.

Key Improvements Delivered:

1. Inclusive and Transparent Processes: A tech-enabled solution designed to support PwC’s diversified business models, meet demand seamlessly, and accelerate growth.
2. Integrated, Consumer-Grade Experience: Consolidates multiple systems to deliver advanced analytics and intuitive workflows.
3. Real-Time, Accurate Matching: Streamlined supply-and-demand matching across labor sources, reducing bias and increasing decision-making efficiency.

The New Solution Achieved:

Following standard practice, the project consists of two phases.

In Phase 1, the team conducted user research, identified pain points, and created personas to map the current state journey. This work culminated in a future-state journey and experience recommendations, which were validated through workshops and presented to stakeholders to secure funding and alignment for Phase 2.

Phase 2 focused on developing and implementing the solution. The team split into two Agile Release Trains (ART) to build the platform, using concept testing and in-PI experience testing to validate features and refine the design. Prototypes and design systems ensured scalability, while workshops fine-tuned the final solution to align with both user and business needs.

In Phase 1, the focus was on research and generating insights. We staffed researchers to define user needs and identify pain points, while I contributed by summarizing the insights and recommending a future-state journey for the staffing process.

In Phase 2, the emphasis shifted to design. UX designers collaborated with Salesforce specialists and larger Agile teams to develop and refine solutions, ensuring alignment with both user and business goals.

To create a future-state journey, it was critical to first understand the pain points within the current staffing and deployment process across each Line of Service (LOS). By the end of Phase 1, the experience team was expected to deliver a future-state experience map, supported by data and analysis, to guide decision-making during the Stakeholder Decision Workshop.

I joined the project during the final stages of the discovery phase, contributing to the development of the future-state experience journey. My role involved synthesizing insights and collaborating with the strategists to design a streamlined and user-centered staffing and deployment process.

The Research Team identified 4 primary personas that are critical to the staffing and deployment process.

These personas take center stage in our user-centered approach. They are:

Business Lead:

• Partners and directors who bring in business to the firm
• Need accurate and real time data, integrated systems and intelligent tools to set up the foundational information of a project
• Want insights into staff skills to create the optimum team

Project Lead / Engagement Manager:

• Managers and directors who brought in to a project by Business Lead.
• Want automation processes to avoid repetitive task.
• Managers of a working team, directly managing resources and staffing changes

Deployment Consultant:

• The resource & staffing team, who’s responsible for multiple different project teams (up to ~300 individuals) to resolve staffing conflicts.
• Need accurate data of all employees & contractors’ skills, experiences and availabilities across the whole practice.
• Want automation processes to avoid repetitive tasks.

Employee:

• The individual contributors of a working team.
• Want transparency into their staffing opportunities.
• Want opportunities to grow their skills and career.

Supporting Roles:

While not primary personas, other roles influence the staffing process in specific ways:

• Relationship Leader (RL): Directors or partners who provide career, firm, and project advice to employees.
• Finance Team: Responsible for approving budgeting side of staffing decisions.
• Compliance Agents: Ensure employees meet eligibility requirements for specific projects.

Although these supporting roles provide essential checkpoints throughout the staffing process, their involvement is limited to specific approval or compliance tasks. As their overall impact on the process is minimal, they are not included in the primary persona group.

We identified a few core technologies that bridge Planning, Staffing, Communication, & Deploying part of the staffing process

The staffing and deployment process relies on several platforms and technologies, but access to these platforms varies based on employee seniority.

Global CRM (GCRM): GCRM serves as a centralized database for Business Leaders to document client information. It facilitates shared knowledge across the firm, providing insights into ongoing and completed projects with different clients.

Flexforecast (Flex): Flex is a finance platform that houses financial information for both internal and external projects. It includes real-time rates for all employees across PwC's Lines of Service (LOS). Projects must receive finance approval through Flex before work can commence. Additionally, Business Leaders and Engagement Managers can use Flex to assemble project teams and estimate project costs.

Talent Link: (TL): TL is a talent and resource platform that hosts up-to-date employee skills, experience, and availability information. It is accessible to all personas and allows for searching and viewing employee employment details. Deployment Consultants can also access sensitive employment information, such as cohort level, citizenship status, and other relevant data.

Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Teams is widely used as a communication platform for meetings and informal information exchange across different teams involved in the staffing and deployment process.

Offline Tracker: While platforms like Excel sheets, emails, and Google Docs are utilized for communication and information sharing, they lack the capability to effectively organize and process staffing and deployment information across the entire firm.

There are also other platforms such as Estimate Pro (EPro), which is an intelligent tool that help Business Leader and Engagement Manager to preassembling a team and provide project estimate, Polaris, which is a tool to check an employee’s ethics, independence, and compliance to make sure the employee is legible for a certain engagement. For example, if an employee or their families are actively trading Tesla stock, that employee not allow to work on Tax or Audit for Tesla, avoiding insider trading and ensure the integrity of the firm.

We Map out the end to end process of the current staffing journey Across multiple LOS

We conducted a detailed analysis of the current staffing journey across multiple Lines of Service (LOS) and identified significant pain points, particularly between the Define Demand and Assign Resource phases. These issues, highlighted in red and labeled with letters, underline inefficiencies and areas for improvement:

a. Lack of Project Pipeline Transparency: Deployment Consultants (DCs) are unaware of staffing requests until Engagement Leaders (ELs) notify them. DCs need visibility into the project pipeline to proactively allocate resources.

b. Limited Insight into Talent Pool: ELs often struggle to find resources beyond their immediate network. With up to 400 employees and 250+ contributors per practice, ELs need a centralized platform to browse team members' skills, experience, and availability.

c. Informal Request Tracking: Resource requests occur via informal conversations on Microsoft Teams. DCs rely on pen and paper to track multiple requests, leading to inefficiencies and errors.

d. Inadequate Talent Link Functionality: Talent Link hosts resource availability data but lacks search and filter capabilities for skills or experience. DCs resort to spreadsheets and group chats with other DCs to manage and filter availability, which is cumbersome and error-prone.

f. Manual Financial Cross-Checking: After selecting candidates, ELs must cross-check project budgets by toggling between Talent Link and Flex. This repetitive and manual process is time-consuming and prone to errors.

This end-to-end mapping underscores the need for centralized, integrated tools to address these pain points, enhance efficiency, and improve user satisfaction throughout the staffing process.

6 overarching pain Points Driving inefficiencies in the current staffing process

Through our analysis, we identified six high-level pain points that serve as the root causes of the current inefficiencies in the staffing process. These insights will guide the design of the new staffing flow, ensuring that each step of the process directly addresses these critical issues:

To address the core issues of the current staffing process, the experience and tech teams collaborated using Miro to design a comprehensive Future State Journey. This journey outlines new experience touch points and workflows aimed at resolving structural inefficiencies. Key solutions include:

1. Centralized Information Integration:

• Aggregating data from various PwC databases into a single platform to enhance pipeline transparency.
• Enabling employees to explore new opportunities and allowing deployment teams to proactively plan staffing schedules.

2. Transparent Resource Request System:

• Establishing a formalized and standardized resource request process to replace undocumented and offline communications.
• Streamlining the workflow and eliminating inefficiencies caused by informal tracking.

3. Enhanced Talent Filtering System:

• Incorporating filters for industry interest, project experience, location, and availability directly into the platform.
• Empowering engagement and deployment teams to discover and identify talent beyond their immediate network.

These new features consolidate staffing tasks within a single platform, eliminating 100% of the back-and-forth offline communication between engagement and deployment teams. By providing full visibility into the communication chain, the redesigned process ensures seamless collaboration for all involved members.

After analyzing the current-state blueprint from different Lines of Service (LoS), we discovered significant variation in staffing processes. Creating a unique journey for every LoS was impractical and risked further isolating LoS from each other, undermining cross-LoS collaboration. This presented a critical challenge:

How Might We Unify Diverse Staffing Models Across LoS into a Cohesive Framework?

During the mapping of the current state, we found that not all LoS had truly unique staffing processes—many shared core similarities. For instance:

• Cloud and Digital (C&D): This business unit runs on an agile team model (POD staffing), staffing entire teams rather than individual employees. Budgeting is done for the team as a whole, often including developers, QA testers, business associates, and UX professionals.
• Deals: Although time-sensitive and distinct in its urgency, the Deals model operates similarly to C&D. Teams are pre-allocated, with individuals "on paper" staffed for immediate availability. Deals team leads have the authority to bypass deployment and financial approvals to ensure rapid staffing.

When I joined the project, I asked the research team to walk me through how different personas used the platforms to complete their tasks. To my surprise, the researchers lacked knowledge of how the platforms worked and did not have deep access to them. This limitation left us with only a high-level understanding of the processes, and the current-state journey mapping lacked critical details about the user experience.

How might we uncover the detailed pain points users experience with the current platforms, so we can design tailored solutions that address their functional needs and improve workflows?

To overcome this challenge, we leveraged validation workshops with users, designed to ensure the future workflow was compatible with each LOS. During these sessions, we asked users to compare their current workflow with the recommended workflow. Users shared their screens and demonstrated their workflows step by step in each platform, enabling us to observe their pain points in real time. This method provided detailed insights into their daily challenges and highlighted inefficiencies that had not been captured in earlier phases.

The future-state journey serves a dual purpose: it’s both a research documentation for the internal working team and a product framework proposal to secure Phase 2 funding from stakeholders. This means it must be simple to share, easy to explore, and engaging for its audience. Stakeholders need a one-stop-shop where they can see the future vision while diving into detailed pain points and the reasoning behind each experience recommendation.

How might we present a multitude of information in a single, accessible medium that enables stakeholders to explore and share the future-state journey effectively?

We explored various media options to deliver the journey:

• Miro Board: While versatile, it posed usability challenges for first-time users.
• PowerPoint Slides: The most commonly used format by PwC leadership, but it limited our ability to visualize the scale of the journey and dive into deeper details.
• Website: A flexible and shareable option, but resource-intensive to create within our time and budget constraints.

Ultimately, we chose to use a Figma prototype as our medium. It combined the flexibility and interactivity of a website with the quick-edit capabilities needed for an iterative process. A secure shareable link ensured broad accessibility for stakeholders, while the highly interactive and visually engaging design created a “wow” factor. This approach demonstrated the expertise and attention to detail of the experience team, building trust and credibility with stakeholders.

To organize our findings and recommendations, we developed a card-based structure map within the Figma prototype. This map allowed stakeholders to click into each step of the journey to explore:

• Associated pain points.
• User quotes from validation sessions.
• Experience recommendations tied to the step.

This approach fulfilled the need for a centralized, interactive, and shareable medium that presented the future-state journey in a way that was both informative and captivating for stakeholders, fostering confidence in the proposed vision.

After securing approval and a $3 million budget for Phase 2, we began building the new staffing tool. To optimize time and resources, stakeholders and the tech team decided to leverage Salesforce Certinia, an out-of-the-box staffing platform that significantly reduced development time compared to building a solution from scratch. This decision aligned with PwC's ecosystem, as the firm already utilized multiple Salesforce enterprise products and had developers experienced with the platform, further saving time and budget.

While leveraging Certinia’s building blocks, the UX team was tasked with delivering a consumer-grade experience. This included refining user interactions on every page, customizing functionality to meet PwC’s specific needs, adapting the UI to align with PwC’s branding, and most importantly, realigning user needs with Certinia’s capabilities. The UX team also played a critical role in prioritizing feature development to ensure the platform addressed core user pain points effectively.

To streamline the development process, we adopted an agile methodology. Two Agile Release Trains (ARTs) were established, each focusing on a distinct phase of the staffing process: workforce planning and defining demands. This structure allowed the teams to work in parallel, accelerating the development timeline while ensuring the final product met both user and business requirements.

Pros:

• Constant User Validation: The project’s high visibility within the firm generated excitement among leadership and users. This enthusiasm translated into active participation in user testing, validation, and focus groups, enabling the creation of a product that closely aligned with user needs.
• High Stakeholder Engagement: Leadership’s consistent involvement fostered trust and alignment, ensuring timely decision-making and resource allocation.

Cons

• Lack of Communication Between Teams: Insufficient coordination between Team 1 and Team 2 led to redundant work and misalignment, causing delays and inefficiencies.
• Limited Research Scope: At the beginning, our researchers focused only on process-related pain points without delving into issues with existing tools. This oversight required additional feature validation in Phase 2, delaying concept testing and feature prioritization by several weeks.