Short increments, real artefacts,
and a gate you control at every step
Nobody buys consulting because they enjoy the process. They buy it because something needs to change and the internal path to changing it is blocked. Our delivery model is built around that fact.
Three commitments shape everything below: every increment ends with something in your account, every engagement opens with the number it must move, and every stage has an explicit exit.
The last one is the least common and the most useful. A consulting engagement with no defined stopping point converts, over time, into a relationship nobody re-evaluates. We would rather earn the next stage than assume it.
Deciding what failure looks like is much easier before anyone is invested in the answer.
Four stages, each with an exit
Assess
Two to four weeks. Portfolio discovery, dependency mapping, security posture, current spend and an AI opportunity scan, ending in a costed roadmap and a business case that survives a CFO reading it.
- Fixed price, fixed duration
- Frequently offset by AWS partner funding
- Output is yours regardless of what you do next
Foundation
Six to twelve weeks. Landing zone, identity, network, guardrails, CI/CD and observability — provisioned as code and mapped to the regulatory controls that apply to you, with a pilot workload migrated end to end.
- Everything in version control, in your accounts
- Controls and their evidence as one artefact
- Pilot proves the pattern before the volume
Deliver
Wave-based migration, a modernisation program or an AI proof of value. Fixed scope and fixed price where the outcome is well understood, with a go/no-go gate you control at the end of each wave.
- Waves sized to be individually abandonable
- Rollback tested before every cutover
- Cost tracked against forecast weekly
Optimise & run
FinOps rhythm, SLO reporting, patching and 24×7 response — or a clean handover to your team with the runbooks and the shadow period to match.
- Improvement backlog, not just steady-state run
- Quarterly architecture and cost review
- Exit assistance written into the agreement
Two meetings, one owner
Programs do not fail in the architecture. They fail in the gap between what the delivery team knows and what the steering committee is told.
Every engagement has one named delivery lead accountable to your program office for the whole thing. Not a rotating account manager — the person in the stand-ups.
Weekly delivery stand-up
Your team and ours, thirty minutes, focused on blockers and the next two weeks. Technical people talking to technical people.
Fortnightly steering committee
Progress against plan, risks with owners and dates, decisions required. Bad news appears here in the same fortnight we learn it.
Stage gate review
A formal decision point at the end of each stage: proceed, adjust or stop. Prepared by us, decided by you.
Post-engagement review
What was promised, what was delivered, what we got wrong. Written down and shared, including the parts that do not flatter us.
Buy it the way that suits your governance
Fixed-scope project
Defined deliverables, defined price. Best for assessments, landing zones and discrete migration waves where the outcome is well understood.
Embedded squad
A cross-functional pod working inside your cadence on a monthly basis. Best for modernisation programs where scope will legitimately change as you learn.
Managed service
An SLA-backed retainer covering run, optimise and improve. Best once you are live and want the platform to keep getting better without hiring for it.
Handover is a workstream, not a final email
Enablement is scoped into every engagement from week one, because a capability transferred at the end is a capability transferred badly. In practice that means four things:
- Pairing, not shadowing. Your engineers write code on the engagement, with ours reviewing. Watching somebody else work teaches very little.
- Documentation as you go. Runbooks written when the knowledge is fresh, tested by someone who was not in the room.
- Your conventions where they exist. We extend your Terraform rather than rewriting it to our house style at your expense.
- A deliberate shadow period. Before we step back, your team runs it while we watch — so the gaps surface while we are still there.
The measure of a good handover is that nobody needs to call us. Most clients keep us anyway, which is the only version of that outcome worth having.
Start with the assessment
Two to four weeks, fixed price, and an output you own regardless of whether we do anything else together.