IT consulting & projects
For the work that has a start and a finish.
An office move, a system replacement, an audit somebody is asking for, the migration that has been on the list since last year. Scoped properly, priced before it starts, and run by people who will still be here when it is done.
The quarter this is for
It has been on the list for four quarters and it is still on the list.
Everybody agrees it needs doing. Nobody has a spare fortnight, because the people who would do it are the same people keeping the week running. So it slips, and each time it slips it gets a little more urgent and a little more expensive.
Project work is not the same job as support. It needs someone whose week is not going to be interrupted by a printer, and a scope agreed before anyone starts rather than discovered halfway through.
What we get called for
Four kinds of work.
You do not need to be a client for any of this, and plenty of these start as a one-off.
Tell me where I stand
Assessments and audits
- An IT audit before a purchase, a sale or a board paper
- A cloud readiness assessment with real numbers in it
- A second opinion on what your current provider has proposed
- Due diligence on the technology inside a business you are buying
Help me decide
Planning and strategy
- A hardware and software lifecycle plan you can budget against
- A technology roadmap that survives contact with a real year
- Business continuity planning, including impact analysis
- Compliance work where a client or insurer has set the bar
Build the thing
Physical projects
- New office design, fit-out and installation
- Structured cabling and server room design
- Office moves, including the part everybody underestimates
- Network rebuilds and Wi-Fi that reaches the whole floor
Move it, change it
Migrations and modernisation
- Cloud migrations, staged so a problem is not everybody’s problem
- Server replacement and virtualisation
- Document management and getting genuinely paperless
- Telecom and phone system changes
How a project runs
No surprises is the whole point.
We look before we quote
A fixed price written against a guess is either padded or wrong, and both are bad for you. We spend the time to understand what is actually there first, including the parts nobody mentioned because everyone had stopped noticing them.
Scope in writing, before anything starts
What is included, what is not, what it costs, how long it takes, and what would change the number. If we find something mid-project that moves the scope, you hear about it that day rather than in the final invoice.
Done around your business
Cutovers happen when they disrupt least, which usually means evenings, weekends or whatever your quiet period is. Your staff are told what is changing before it changes, not after they notice.
One person answerable
A named point of contact for the whole project, so you are not tracking down whoever was on site last. They are the same person at the end as at the beginning.
Written down when it is finished
What was built, how it is configured, and where the credentials live. Documentation is part of the job rather than a thing that happens if there is time, and it is yours whether or not we support it afterwards.
We stay reachable
Projects have a settling period and things surface in the first fortnight. Being local and still here is the difference between a quick fix and starting again with somebody new.
Advice with nothing riding on it
We will tell you when the answer is to do nothing.
A consultant paid by the project has a quiet incentive to find a project. It is worth naming, because you should be asking it about anybody you bring in, including us.
Our model is long-term support relationships, which means we carry the consequences of bad advice for years. Recommending a migration you did not need is not a win for us, because we are the ones supporting it afterwards. Sometimes the honest answer is that your setup is fine and the money is better spent elsewhere.
- Scoped before it is priced
- Vendor-neutral where it matters
- We support what we build
- No project is a valid finding
Included, not extra
Planning comes with managed and co-managed IT.
Projects are quoted. The planning that decides which projects are worth doing is not, for fully managed and co-managed clients. We sit down with your team, work out the budget and the replacement cycle against what your business is actually trying to do, and give you a number you can put in next year.
Approach one
Spares on the shelf
Keep a machine or two in reserve, run everything until it fails, and swap in a spare the same day. Lowest ongoing spend, and perfectly sensible for plenty of businesses.
It works when downtime on any one desk is survivable and your staff are not doing anything a spare cannot handle. It stops working when the failures cluster, which they eventually do.
Approach two
A scheduled lifecycle
Every machine has a replacement date, a portion of the fleet is refreshed each year, and the cost becomes a predictable line in the budget rather than a surprise.
It costs more in a quiet year and far less in a bad one. Businesses that cannot tolerate an unplanned outage, or that need to show a plan to an insurer or auditor, usually land here.
Approach three
Somewhere in between
Where most businesses actually end up, and there is nothing untidy about it. The roles that would stop the business get a scheduled refresh. Everything else runs on spares.
The work is deciding which is which, and that decision comes out of how your business runs rather than out of a vendor’s recommended cycle.
There is no right answer here, only a right answer for you. What matters is that it was chosen rather than arrived at, and that somebody has put a number against it.
Questions we get asked
The things owners actually want to know.
Pulled from the central library, tagged for this page. All questions and answers →
Related
Often taken alongside this.
Tell us what has been on the list.
Half an hour, no charge. Bring the thing that keeps getting pushed, and we will tell you honestly what it involves.
Would rather write?
Send this and we will reply, usually the same business day. No call unless you want one.
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