Approach

How engagements are shaped

Assessment first. Before recommending anything, I spend a defined stretch of time with your systems, your vendors, and the people doing the work. It has a fixed scope and a fixed fee, and it ends in a written plan rather than changes to your systems.

The plan is broken into pieces that can each be approved on their own. You pick what to do, in what order, and on what timeline suits the business. Each piece gets its own short agreement and its own quote, and the pieces you approve are work I do, not work I hand off. Anything you’d rather handle in house or with someone else is yours to take; the plan is written to be usable without me.

Where it helps, I stay on afterward, either to see a project through or on a modest ongoing basis for the bigger decisions. There’s always a clear line between ongoing support and new work, so nobody is surprised by a bill.

What you get

• A written assessment in plain language. What you have, what it costs to run, where the gaps and risks are, and what I’d do about them, in order.
• A roadmap with honest sizes. Each recommendation comes with a rough cost and the reasoning behind it, and says when a cheaper option is good enough.
• For projects already underway, an accounting. What was contracted, what was delivered, what is still owed, and your realistic options for finishing.
• Work that stays with you. Documentation, standards, and tests live in your accounts and your repositories. Your documents and data are yours, and anything I build for you is licensed to you permanently.
• A walkthrough. Every major deliverable ends with a conversation, not just a file.

What I don’t do

• Resell or take commissions. My only income from an engagement is what you pay me.
• Recommend throwing work away without showing the comparison. What you’ve already invested counts.
• Run your help desk. Printers, password resets, and register errors are better handled by your vendors or a help-desk service. I can help you set that up, then handle what they can’t.
• Give legal advice. I’ll review a contract’s technical scope in detail. Its legal terms are for your attorney.
• Start work I can’t scope. If I can’t tell you what something will cost, the first step is finding out.