How we work
Make a list of your achievements toward your long-term goal, and remind yourself that intentions do not count — only actions.
Our process
Five phases, and what each one buys you
The same shape on every engagement, sized to the problem in front of us.
01 — Discover
Workshops with the people who do the work today, a map of the current system, and agreement on what success actually looks like.
02 — Design
Domain model, service boundaries and interface prototypes tested with real users before anything is committed to.
03 — Build
Two-week increments, continuous integration, and an environment you can use at any point in the programme.
04 — Harden
Load testing, security review, accessibility audit and the operational tooling required for launch.
05 — Operate
Support, iteration and documented handover whenever you decide to run it yourself.
Throughout — Review
Fortnightly demonstrations, a live risk register and a transparent burn-down of the budget.
What it is like to work with us
You get a small, senior, cross-functional team and a single point of accountability. You get told about problems in the week they appear rather than the month they become unavoidable.
You also get pushed back on. If a requirement is going to cost more than it is worth, we will show the working and recommend dropping it. Clients tell us that conversation is the most valuable thing we do.
- A named delivery lead for the whole engagement
- Fortnightly demonstrations open to anyone in your organisation
- A live, shared backlog you can reprioritise at any increment
- Written decisions, so nobody depends on remembering a meeting
Common questions about delivery
Most engagements begin with a two to four week discovery: we work with the people who do the job today, map the existing system, and produce a costed delivery plan. From there we deliver in two-week increments with working software in your environment at the end of each one.
You can stop at the end of discovery with a plan you own, and take it elsewhere. Several clients have. We would rather that than build the wrong thing.
Discovery work can usually start within two to three weeks. A full delivery team takes four to six weeks to assemble properly — we do not staff engagements with whoever happens to be free.
Yes, entirely. Source code, infrastructure definitions and documentation are yours from the first commit, held in your repositories where you prefer that. We hold no intellectual property over work we build for you.
We estimate ranges, not points, and we show the assumptions behind them. After discovery you get a plan with a confidence band; as work proceeds that band narrows and we tell you promptly when something moves outside it.
Two models. Fixed-price for well-defined scopes with a clear specification, and time-and-materials for exploratory or long-running work where fixing the scope would be dishonest. Discovery is always fixed-price so you know the cost of finding out.
Under a written data processing agreement, with access limited to the individuals who need it, all access logged. We work within your environment and your accounts wherever possible, so production data does not leave your control.
Tiered support from business-hours response through to 24/7 on-call, with response and resolution targets written into the agreement. All tiers include proactive monitoring and dependency patching.
Start with a discovery conversation.
No obligation, and you keep whatever we produce.