An outside read on your technology: what is working, what is quietly costing you, and what to do first. You get it in writing before anyone signs a purchase order.
A familiar pattern. Somebody sat through a demo, it looked good, and the business is now months into a rollout for a problem nobody ever wrote down. The other pattern is a stack that grew by accident: several tools doing overlapping jobs, renewal dates nobody tracks, and two suppliers who each think the other one owns the firewall. The bill for both arrives every month.
The first phase is spent finding out what is true. We interview people across the business, walk the estate, read the contracts and note the renewal dates, then pull a year of support tickets to see where the pain actually clusters. The ticket queue and the invoice pile usually tell the story before any monitoring tool does. You get a written current state first, including the parts you already know, so the argument that follows starts from one page rather than three.
Recommendations are easy to write and hard to put in order. We mark which items unblock others, which carry a hard date because a vendor is ending support, and which can safely wait a year at no cost. Each one gets a cost band, an effort estimate and the risk of doing nothing. Then it is grouped into quarters you can put in front of a board. If you want us involved through delivery, we will chair the design reviews and hold suppliers to what was agreed.
The commonest outcome of an assessment is nothing at all. That is rarely because the analysis was wrong. It is that the document arrived with no owner against each line, no date, and nobody whose next appraisal mentioned it, so it lost to the work already in the diary. We have written one or two of those and would rather not write another. What makes the difference is unglamorous: a named person per recommendation, a first item small enough to finish inside a month so the plan visibly moves, a cost band that survives contact with your finance team, and a review date in the calendar before we leave the building. If nobody can be named as owner for an item while we are writing it, that itself is worth knowing early.
A fair number of engagements begin with the decision already made. A director liked a product, or the incumbent supplier has quoted for the next three years, and what is really wanted is an outside name on the page. We will do the review, and the answer may well be that the decision is sound, but we say what we think rather than what was ordered. The same discipline applies to selection exercises where the incumbent always wins. It usually wins because the requirements were written from its own feature list, or because the cost of switching was never estimated, so nobody could argue with staying. We write requirements from what your staff have to do, price the disruption of moving honestly, and then let the incumbent win properly if it deserves to.
What you run, what it costs across licences, support contracts and people, and where the renewal dates fall. Usually the first document that has put all three on one page.
Recommendations put in order: what unblocks what, what carries a vendor end of support date, and what can safely wait a year at no cost to anybody.
Requirements written from what your staff do rather than from a feature list, scoring agreed before the demos start, and reference calls we make with you on the line.
A second read on a design before it is built, particularly where two systems must exchange data and neither supplier considers that exchange to be their responsibility.
Whether the work belongs to employees, a supplier or both, what a first internal hire should actually be, and which responsibilities nobody in the organisation currently holds.
A technical read before an acquisition, a large contract, or a rescue decision on a late project. Delivered as a short document with the risks priced rather than merely listed.
Before any analysis, the actual question and who signs it off. Half the assessments that go nowhere were commissioned without anybody agreeing what would be decided at the end of them.
Invoices, licence counts, support contracts and renewal dates. Spend tells a truer story about what an organisation values than interviews do, and reading it takes days rather than weeks.
The staff who built a spreadsheet or a group chat to get the job done. That workaround is the evidence, and it is almost never visible from the management floor.
Cost band, effort estimate and the risk of doing nothing, grouped into quarters, with the reasoning kept in so a decision can be revisited when circumstances change.
A date, an owner per line, and a first item small enough to finish within a month. Advice with no follow up appointment is how a plan becomes a filed document.
Three years and a substantial sum are about to be committed, and the only analysis available was written by the supplier who benefits from the answer.
Which is not a selection process. They may still be the right supplier, and at the moment you have no way to demonstrate that to anyone who asks.
Somebody has to produce a document with costs and an order to it, and everyone capable of writing it is busy running what already exists.
You need somebody who can read the design, talk to the supplier as a peer, and tell you plainly whether this is recoverable or not.
A written plan with an order to it, costs against each item, and the reasoning kept in so a decision can be revisited when circumstances change. It is meant to be handed to whoever pays for it and understood without us in the room. What it is not is a slide deck of industry trends, which is the thing this kind of engagement most often degrades into.
No, and the plan says plainly where the answer is a product you should buy, a supplier you already have, or something your own team should own. An advisory engagement that always concludes with a large build for the advisor is not advice. Where we do want the work, that is stated rather than implied.
Long enough to see the systems and talk to the people who use them, and no longer. The bulk of the value comes from what is learned in the first conversations with the staff who work around the problems every day, and from reading what you already spend. We agree the boundary before starting so it does not drift into a project of its own.
Often, yes, and we would rather say so than sell an assessment for its own sake. What is worth checking first is whether the problem you have named is the cause or a symptom, because the two are frequently different, and starting work on the symptom is how budgets get spent without anything getting better.
Yes, and we will tell you which version of that request we think we are answering. There is a legitimate one: a decision taken on reasonable grounds, and somebody sensibly wants a second read before the money moves. There is also the version where an outside name is wanted on a page to settle an internal argument. We are glad to do the first and will not pretend to be doing it while doing the second. In practice the review takes a few days and looks at the requirements the choice was measured against, the switching cost nobody estimated, and the two or three failure modes that only show up in year two. If the decision is sound we say so in a paragraph and charge for days rather than for a project.
Decide the measure before we start, because afterwards everybody agrees with whatever happened. Some of it is countable: a support queue that halves in one category, a renewal signed below the opening quote, a project that lands inside the band we gave it, a system decommissioned and its licence actually stopped. Some of it is not countable, and the honest form there is a dated prediction rather than a number. We write down what we expect to be true in twelve months, including where we think the risk sits, and that document can be reread later at our expense. Advice that cannot be wrong cannot be checked, so be wary of any adviser, ourselves included, whose recommendations are phrased so that no future event could contradict them.
Then it is a wish list, and we would rather discover that in week two than at the presentation. So we ask early what has actually been approved for the coming financial year, not what has been discussed in a corridor, and build the plan against that number with a clearly separated section for what more money would buy. Sequencing changes completely depending on the answer. With limited funds the order is driven by what stops something breaking and what removes a recurring cost, and several sensible improvements simply wait their turn. It is worth adding that a few recommendations pay for themselves inside a year, usually licence consolidation and retiring systems nobody logs into, and when money is tight those go first.
If you already know what needs doing and just need hands, hire a contractor. It is cheaper, quicker to arrange, and you keep control of the decision. Consulting earns its fee when the question is which of these should we do and in what order, when a choice has to be defended to a board, an insurer or an auditor, or when internal politics mean an outside voice is the only way a conclusion gets heard at all. Those situations are real and they are narrower than the industry likes to imply. We turn work away on this basis fairly regularly, and the usual advice is to spend the money on delivery instead. Paying somebody to confirm an answer you already hold is an expensive way to buy confidence.
We are happy to answer any questions you have and help you work out which of our services fit your needs.
