The questions we get before every engagement.

With a conversation, not a form. For anything substantial we run a short paid discovery — typically two to four weeks — that produces an architecture, a costed plan, and the risks worth worrying about. You own that output whether or not you continue with us.

Both. We prefer fixed-price for well-defined scope because it forces clarity on both sides, and time and materials for exploratory or long-running platform work. Discovery is almost always fixed-price.

A two-week assessment. Below that we are unlikely to add enough value to justify the onboarding cost, and we will usually say so rather than take the work.

Yes, and we do regularly. If the right answer is to keep the system you have, hire internally, or use an off-the-shelf product, we will say so in the assessment. It is the only thing that makes our recommendations worth anything.

The people you met. We name the team in the proposal and keep it stable for the engagement. Nobody is swapped out for a cheaper resource once the contract is signed.

You get the repository, the board, the environments, and a working demo on a fixed cadence from the second sprint onward. There is no separate status report written for you — you can see the same thing the team sees.

You hear it from us the week it appears, not the month before a deadline. Every engagement has a named delivery lead with the authority to change the plan, and we run written post-mortems that clients are welcome to read.

Yes. For product engineering work in particular we work in your repositories, your board, and your ceremonies rather than running a parallel process and integrating at the end.

You do. Full IP and source code ownership transfers to you, including the infrastructure code, the architecture decision records, and the documentation. We retain no licence back on client-specific work.

Scope is negotiable at every sprint boundary. Changes are priced and agreed before work starts, and the trade-off against existing scope is made explicit rather than absorbed silently.

Monthly in arrears against delivered increments for time and materials, or against milestones for fixed-price engagements. Milestones are tied to working software, not to documents.

Ninety days of hypercare after go-live, staffed by the team that built the system, is included in every delivery engagement. Beyond that you can take an SLA-backed support retainer or move to your own team.

That is usually the goal. Handover includes onboarding sessions, the architecture decision record set, runbooks, and a support taper rather than a cliff edge. Several clients have taken full ownership within a quarter.

Yes, for cloud platforms, data centre infrastructure, and security monitoring — under an SLA with defined response times and service credits. It is an option, never a condition of the build.

For continuity and for the absence of a pyramid. The senior people who scope your engagement deliver it, escalation reaches a partner rather than an account manager, and you are not funding a bench. Where a genuinely large programme needs hundreds of people, a large consultancy is the right answer and we will say so.

Only where the problem crosses boundaries. A single-discipline specialist is often better value for a single-discipline problem. We earn our place when the data platform needs a landing zone, or the CRM rollout needs integration and a compliance mode, and you would otherwise be managing three suppliers and the gaps between them.

If we cannot staff it to our own standard, if the success measure cannot be defined, if an off-the-shelf product would clearly serve you better, or if the sponsor wants a diagnostic to reach a conclusion that has already been decided. We would rather decline than deliver something we would not reference.

We would prefer it. A fixed-fee assessment or a four-week walking skeleton is the cheapest way for both sides to discover whether the working relationship and the technical judgement hold up. Most of our long engagements began that way.

You are told before it affects you, and the replacement is introduced with overlap rather than dropped in. Because architecture decisions are written down as they are made and code is reviewed by more than one person, continuity does not depend on any individual's memory — which is the real mitigation.

At the next phase boundary, in the open, with the decision recorded. We hold quality and the date fixed and treat scope as the variable. If a disagreement cannot be resolved at engagement level it escalates to a partner within two business days, and we would rather lose an argument early than manage it quietly.

Professional indemnity and cyber cover, with certificates supplied as standard during contracting. Cover levels are stated in the master services agreement rather than negotiated per engagement.

Project work stops at a phase boundary with everything delivered up to that point in your repository, deployable and documented. Retainers have a notice period stated in the contract, typically one month, with a documented exit plan from the first month rather than written at the end.