It's common for clients to not know how many systems they run. Six weeks, a fixed fee, and you get an inventory with a name against every entry.
What is in it
Six capabilities, one deliverable your team keeps.
Discovery
Traffic, dependencies and integration points, measured rather than asked about. What talks to what, established from what actually moves.
Ownership
A named human against every system, agreed with them rather than assigned in their absence. The part everyone skips and nobody can skip twice.
Criticality
Established from real usage, so the answer survives the meeting where four teams each claim to be first in line.
Cost band
What each system would cost to modernize, migrate or retire, with the working attached rather than a number to be taken on trust.
Retention
Which records carry a legal obligation, established before anything is proposed rather than discovered when you try to switch something off.
Handover
The inventory ships in a format your team maintains afterward. It is a live artifact, not a report that ages on a shared drive.
Six weeks
Two measuring, two interviewing against the measurements, two costing.
The interviews come second, deliberately
We measure first and talk second, because an interview conducted before the measurement produces the org chart rather than the estate. People describe the system they are responsible for, not the one that is running. Once you can show somebody a traffic graph, the conversation changes and gets shorter.
What you receive
| Artifact | Form |
|---|---|
| The inventory | A maintained register in your own tooling, not a PDF |
| The dependency map | A diagram and the source it was generated from |
| The cost model | A workbook with the formulas visible |
| The recommendation | Four pages, ranked, with a date against each line |
Questions we are always asked
Four of them, answered the way we answer them on the phone.
Do you need access to production?
Read-only, and only where a measurement cannot be taken from a lower environment. In practice that is about a third of an estate. We will tell you which third before we ask.
What if we already have a CMDB?
Then we start from it and tell you where it is wrong, which is the useful part. Every CMDB we have ever been handed was accurate about the systems somebody was proud of and silent about the rest.
Is the fixed fee really fixed?
Yes. The scope is the estate as defined on day one. If it turns out to be twice the size we say so in week two, and you decide whether to widen it or stop.
What if the recommendation is to do nothing?
It sometimes is, and we have written it. Doing nothing on purpose is a decision. Doing nothing by default is the problem you called us about.
Case studies
Programs in this area, described by what they were rather than by who paid for us.
