We consult as engineers who deliver, which changes what we are willing to recommend. Every roadmap we write is one we would be prepared to execute ourselves — and be measured on.

Standard value assessment duration
Assessments concluding: do not proceed
Assessment fee credited against delivery
A client showed us a transformation strategy from a well-known firm. It was intelligent, well-researched and entirely correct in its analysis. It was also unexecutable: it assumed a data platform that did not exist, integration capabilities their systems did not support, and a level of process discipline their operation had never demonstrated.
Eighteen months and a considerable fee later, nothing had moved. Not because the advice was wrong, but because the people who wrote it never had to build anything and therefore never discovered what was actually possible.
We consult from the opposite direction. Our recommendations are constrained by what we would be willing to sign a delivery contract for, at a price, against a measured outcome. That constraint removes a great deal of elegant advice from the table — and everything that survives it can actually be done. If we would not build it, we do not recommend it.
Their roadmap was less ambitious than the one we paid far more for, and it is the one we actually completed.
Each of these ends with decisions and a costed plan, not a document that describes your business back to you.
Two weeks with your finance and operations leaders to locate where value leaks and to write the value model: metric, baseline, target, owner, review date.
An honest assessment of where AI would pay in your business, what your data can actually support, and which fashionable use cases to refuse.
Independent review of an existing platform, a stalled build or an acquisition target, covering scalability, security, cost, maintainability and key-person risk.
Structured comparison of products against a custom build using your real requirements and total cost of ownership over five years.
A sequenced, costed plan where each phase funds the next, designed so that value arrives before the programme loses political support.
Diagnosis of a failing programme with a blunt assessment of what is salvageable, what should be abandoned, and what it will cost to finish.

Each of these is written into the engagement as a number with an owner, a baseline and a review date.
The most valuable output of an assessment is frequently a decision not to spend. Roughly one in five of ours concludes that the client should not proceed, and we put that in writing.
Sequencing value early keeps political support alive. Most transformation failures are not technical — they are budget withdrawals that follow eighteen months without a visible result.
Boards and investors act faster on independent technical diligence with risk ratings than on internal advocacy, particularly where an acquisition or a large build is at stake.
Measured against the baseline agreed with the client before the engagement started.
Written recommendations not to proceed
Standard value assessment
Against any subsequent delivery engagement
The value assessment produces a value model, a ranked opportunity list and an honest recommendation — credited in full against any delivery that follows.