Approach
Five stages, and what you can hold us to at each one.
The sequence below is the whole engagement. It is written out so you can judge the method before you buy it.
Scoping call
Forty-five minutes, at no charge, to establish whether the problem you have is one we can actually help with. We say no in this call when the answer is no — it is cheaper for both sides than discovering it in week three.
Written proposal
A document stating the question we are answering, what you receive, the dates, and the fee. Nothing starts on a verbal agreement, and the fee in the proposal is the fee you pay.
Evidence
We look at what is actually happening before recommending anything: the records you already keep, a handful of interviews, and where necessary sitting with the work as it runs.
Findings
A written document. Findings are separated from recommendations, and every recommendation carries the effort it costs and the assumption it rests on, so you can disagree with the reasoning rather than the conclusion.
Handover
A working session with the people who have to live with the change. Documents nobody can operate are not a deliverable.
Why findings are separated from recommendations
A finding is something we observed: this queue holds an average of eleven items, this step is repeated for one order in six. A recommendation is a judgement about what to do with it. Mixing the two makes advice impossible to argue with, because disagreeing with the conclusion looks like disagreeing with the facts. Keeping them apart lets you accept the observation and reject the proposal, which is often the right outcome.
Why every recommendation states an assumption
Recommendations rest on conditions: that volume keeps growing, that the person doing the work stays, that the supplier holds its price. When the condition is written down next to the recommendation, you can check it in three months and know immediately whether the advice still stands. When it is left implicit, a recommendation quietly becomes wrong without anyone noticing.
What we need from you
- Access to the records you already keep. We do not ask you to start measuring something new before we begin.
- Time with two or three people who do the work daily.
- One decision-maker who can approve a change.
If any of those three is missing, the engagement stalls in the evidence stage. We check for all three in the scoping call and say so before a proposal is written.
How we price
Fixed fee against a fixed scope, stated in the proposal, in United States dollars. Fifty per cent on acceptance and fifty per cent on delivery of the findings. There is no hourly billing and therefore no incentive for the work to take longer than it should.
Next step
A scoping call costs nothing and takes forty-five minutes.
If what you need is outside what we do, we say so in that call rather than writing a proposal for it.