Everything from the first whiteboard to the 3am page
Four areas, run by one team out of two offices. You can buy any of them on their own — most clients start with one and add the next when the first one earns it.
01 · Advisory
Advisory & consulting
Work that produces a decision, not a deck. Most of it ends in a document somebody has to take to a board, an audit committee or a budget round — so it is written for that reader, with the numbers attached and the assumptions visible.
What we are asked for
Cloud and platform strategy — what moves, what stays, what gets retired, and in what order
Operating-model review — who should be doing which work, in-house versus partner
Security uplift roadmap — a sequenced plan with costs, usually off the back of an assessment
Business cases — options analysis with the cost of doing nothing priced honestly
Technology due diligence — for an acquisition, a major purchase or a new supplier
A typical engagement
Two to six weeks, fixed price, one senior consultant plus a principal for review. Interviews across the business rather than just IT, because the thing that blocks a cloud migration is almost never technical. Ends with a written recommendation, an options table, and a one-page version for the people who will not read the rest.
The largest part of what we do — around 45% of the work by revenue. Migrations, integrations and infrastructure, delivered in slices with something demonstrable at the end of each one.
What we build
Microsoft 365 and Azure migration — mail, files, identity, and the applications nobody mentioned until week three
Integration and automation — connecting systems that were bought separately and were never meant to talk
Network and infrastructure refresh — including the sites with a comms cupboard rather than a comms room
Identity and access — single sign-on, conditional access, privileged access cleanup
Testing, cutover and commissioning — with a rollback plan that has actually been rehearsed
Slice the work
Nothing runs longer than six weeks without producing something you can see and use. If it has to, the plan is wrong.
Prove the hard part first
The riskiest component gets built in the first slice, not the last. Bad news early is cheap; bad news at cutover is not.
Rehearse the cutover
Every migration cutover is run at least once against a dress-rehearsal environment, timed, with the rollback executed.
Hypercare, then handover
A month of elevated support with the delivery team still attached, then a documented handover to whoever runs it next — us or you.
Independent work, including independent of us. We will review a project we did not deliver, and we will not bid to remediate an assessment we wrote unless you have taken it to market first.
What we assess
Essential Eight maturity — assessed against the current ACSC model, scored per mitigation
ISO 27001 readiness — gap analysis and a remediation plan ahead of certification
Vendor and third-party due diligence — before you sign, while you still have leverage
Independent project review — for a programme that is late and nobody can say why
Disaster recovery validation — testing the plan rather than reading it
We separate assessment from remediation on purpose. A firm that scores your security and then sells you the fix has an obvious incentive to find a lot of problems. If we assess you, the remediation goes to market — and we are happy to lose it.
About 30% of the business, and the part that lasts. A service desk with published response targets, prepaid hour banks, monitoring, patching and licence management.
Published SLAs
Four priority levels with response and restoration targets against each, reported monthly whether we hit them or not.
Monitoring & patching
Proactive maintenance so most of what would have become a ticket never becomes one. The measure of a good month is a quiet one.
Hour banks
Buy hours up front at a discount. Incidents, changes and advice all draw from the same balance, and it carries month to month.
The commercial shape should follow how well the scope is understood, not how the supplier prefers to be paid. Here is when each one is the honest answer.
Fixed price
One number, agreed before we start, for a scope written down in enough detail that both sides can tell whether it was met.
When it fits
Discovery and assessment work
Migrations with a known inventory
Anything you need a board to approve
When it does not
Integration against a system nobody has documented
Work that depends on a third party's timeline
Anything described as “we will know more once we start”
Time & materials
Charged against hours actually worked, at a published rate, with a not-to-exceed ceiling and a weekly burn report. The ceiling is the point — T&M without one is a blank cheque.
When it fits
Genuinely exploratory work
Augmenting a team you already have
Legacy systems with no reliable documentation
When it does not
Well-understood, repeatable delivery
Where the buyer has no capacity to govern the burn
Retainer
A monthly fee for a named team with reserved capacity and a service level. You are buying availability and continuity, not a fixed list of tasks.
When it fits
Ongoing operations and support
A rolling programme of small changes
Where knowing the same engineers matters
When it does not
One-off projects with a clear end
Demand too lumpy to justify reserved capacity
Hour bank — engineering as a service
A prepaid block of hours at a discount to standard rate, drawn down by incidents, changes and advice alike. The balance carries month to month, and we report it to you rather than making you ask.
A two-week fixed-price discovery, or a block of hours on a bank. We would rather start small and be judged on it than write a proposal for a programme neither side has enough information to scope.
Yes to reselling, and yes there is a margin — it is disclosed on the quote as a line item rather than buried in a rate. If you would rather buy direct and have us just manage the tenancy, that is a supported option and it changes nothing else about the service.
Yes. At 38 people we do not have a separate sales team who hand you to strangers — the consultant in the room is the consultant on the work. If someone has to change mid-engagement we tell you before it happens, not after.
It goes with you. Runbooks, network diagrams, credentials and asset registers are yours, handed over in an open format, and the exit assistance clause is in the standard agreement rather than something to negotiate under pressure later.
Remotely, yes, and we travel for cutovers and site work. What we will not do is claim a national on-site footprint we do not have — if your regional sites need hands within four hours, we will tell you to keep a local provider for that and we will manage them.
Not sure which of these you need?
That is a normal place to start, and it is what discovery is for. Tell us the symptom rather than the solution and we will work backwards from it.