How we work
The usual engagement plan, step by step.
Five steps. Some get skipped: a client who already knows what to build starts at the system, a client with one process on fire starts at the pilot. Below — what each step contains, what comes out of it, and how long it takes.
Five steps. Most start at step one or two.
- 0 · The conversation. Forty-five minutes, free. We run two or three of your real documents on screen and tell you what we see. You leave with an opinion and a proposal, not with work. Engineering time starts at the first paid step, and it is priced where it is spent.
- 1 · The review. 3 days to 2 weeks, depending on the line. Read access to the systems, your real documents rather than samples someone tidied, and time with the people who run the process. What comes out is the design — architecture, integration map, milestones in weeks, assumptions — set out below. Fixed price, credited against the project within 60 days.
- 2 · The pilot. 3–6 weeks. One process, one flow, or one terminal, taken all the way to real use rather than to a demonstration. Boundaries named in the offer, because a pilot without a boundary is a project with an optimistic name.
- 3 · The system. 8–14 weeks. Fixed after the review, or by milestone.
- 4 · Running it. A retainer, priced by volume handled rather than by people assigned.
The five steps are the same for all three lines of work; their length and price differ.
Understand › design › build › integrate › run › hand over
Understand. Read access to the systems, real data rather than samples someone tidied, 6–8 hours of a person who actually knows the process, your non-functional constraints — latency, uptime, where the data may sit — and one named person who can decide. 2 weeks at the outside.
Design. Architecture, the integration map with every connector named and flagged, decomposition into milestones estimated in weeks, and the list of assumptions that would reopen the estimate if they break. That list is not fine print. It is the part of the document that is honest.
Build. In milestones, at a price fixed after the review. Each milestone ends with something that runs, not with a status report. It is built for the conditions it will actually meet: a satellite link that drops, a site with nobody technical on it, a regulator that decides which country the data sits in.
QA. A fixed set of questions with known answers, run before release and again after every model or corpus change. What it catches is drift: the case that passed last month and fails now, with nobody having touched the code.
Integrate into your landscape. Into the systems as they are configured today, including the one two versions behind and the one whose only export is owned by a person retiring in March. Integration is planned first, because the fear of it is larger than the fear of development and it is the phase that decides the schedule.
Hand over. In full, and in a form somebody else could pick up. Details below.
Support. A retainer, priced by the volume handled rather than by people assigned. The rules keep accumulating, the evaluation set keeps running, and the person answering is the person who built it.
What handover actually contains
Handover package — what physically transfers
- Repository
- application source, complete history, no vendored binaries we cannot name
- infrastructure as code — the environment rebuilt from the repo alone
- CI configuration and the pipeline that built the running version
- Configuration
- every environment variable, with what it does and what breaks without it
- integration credentials — in your vault, issued to you, never to us
- the deployment runbook, written to be executed by someone who was not here
- Model layer
- every prompt, versioned, with the change history
- the evaluation set: questions with known answers, and the last run against it
- provider configuration — and the second provider it has been tested against
- Rules and data
- the rules corpus, including every rule written while resolving exceptions
- the attribute model and the mappings behind it
- seed and reference data, separated from operational data
- Documentation
- architecture, with the decisions that were rejected and why
- the integration map, current as of handover
- the assumptions list — what would need re-examining if any of them changes
- What we keep
- nothing that is required to run it.
What is never in scope, in any statement of work
Reconfiguring your ERP · data cleanup beyond the agreed volume · integrations not named in the statement of work · licences · presence on site · support outside working hours · training beyond two sessions.
Each of these is available, priced separately, and named before signature rather than discovered in month three. A scope that quietly includes everything is a scope that will be argued about.
What you own when it is over
The repository, the documentation, the configuration, the prompts, the evaluation set and the rules corpus. No lock to us, and none to a model provider — the same system has been run against a second provider before handover, and the evaluation set is the evidence that it still behaves.
We keep nothing that is required to run it. If you replace us, the thing keeps working, and the next supplier can read what we did.
How the price is anchored
Against what a delayed order costs you, and what a wrong line costs you. Both are numbers you already have. The review puts them on paper before anyone quotes.
Some of this is not packaged. A package works where reuse is high enough that the estimate holds; where it is not, what is sold is time, and it is called that.
What this method assumes
A real number takes reading your systems first. If you need a fixed price this week, this method cannot honestly produce one, and buying it from someone who will is a reasonable decision.
If a product fits your process, buy the product. Cheaper, faster, better supported.
Somebody has to be available for 6 hours. Without them the review produces a worse document, and we would rather move the date than deliver it.
What is sold is a system that runs, not people who are available. Scope sets the price; retainers are priced by volume handled.
Forty-five minutes. Bring the process, or the documents, or the agent that is getting things wrong. We will tell you which step you are actually at.