Our process
You can end the engagement at any phase and keep everything produced up to that point. We structure it that way on purpose — it keeps us honest about whether the next phase is worth funding.
A typical engagement
Phase 03Between demonstrations of running software
6–10h
Your time in discovery
45 min
Demo every fortnight
90d
Benefit verification
The five phases
Including the part most proposals leave out: how much of your team’s time this actually costs.
We sit with the people doing the work and record what actually happens, including the exceptions nobody documented. Then we measure it.
1–3 weeks
Your time: Roughly 6–10 hours across the phase, mostly from operators rather than executives.
A costed recommendation with the trade-offs written down — including the option of doing nothing, and the option of buying instead of building.
1 week
Your time: One two-hour decision session. You get the document three days before it.
Two-week increments, always deployable, demonstrated in a running system. Evaluation and security review happen every increment, not at the end.
4–20 weeks
Your time: A 45-minute demo every two weeks. Async access to the team throughout.
Shadow or parallel running until the numbers agree with the baseline. This is where the exceptions that would have become incidents show up instead.
2–12 weeks
Your time: Operator review of exception cases — typically 2–4 hours a week.
Staged rollout, monitoring, and a genuine handover. We are finished when your team can run and change this without us.
Ongoing or handover
Your time: Two training sessions, then whatever your team wants.
Engagement principles
The engineers who scope your work build it. No handoff to a delivery team you have not met.
We measure the current state first. Improvement should be a fact you can point at, not an impression.
Every two weeks you see the system running, not a slide describing it. Progress is demonstrated, not asserted.
Scope changes get estimated and quoted before they enter the plan. Nothing is silently absorbed into a drifting number.
Threat modelling at design review and security testing every increment — not a gate discovered two weeks before launch.
Documentation, runbooks and training are scoped, estimated and delivered like any other feature.
No slides from us. Four to six people from your side, ideally including someone who does the work rather than only people who manage it.
Process questions
Still deciding?
Send the question to a senior engineer instead of a form. You will get a straight answer, and a no if that is the honest one.
Ninety minutes, usually four to six people from your side, no slides from ours. We want the process that keeps breaking, whatever numbers you already have, and the constraint you believe is immovable. You leave with a rough systems map and an honest read on whether this is worth pursuing. No charge, no obligation.
Less than you expect and more than zero. Discovery is the heaviest — roughly six to ten hours spread across two to three weeks, and mostly from the people who do the work rather than from executives. During the build phase it is a 45-minute demo every fortnight plus async questions.
You can, at any phase boundary, and you keep everything produced up to that point — including code, documentation and the assessment findings. We deliberately structure engagements in stages so stopping is a real option rather than a negotiation.
Two-week increments with a demonstrable increment at the end of each. We are unceremonious about the ritual — no story-point theatre — but strict about the discipline: always deployable, always demonstrated, always reviewed.
We write the trade-off down as a decision record with the options, the risks and our recommendation, then you decide. If you choose differently from our recommendation we record that too and build what you asked for. What we will not do is quietly build our preference.
We come back and measure. The business case gets re-tested against the actual numbers and we publish the result — including when it came in under what we projected. That review is part of every engagement and it is not optional on our side.
Start the conversation
Bring the process that keeps breaking and whatever numbers you have. You leave with a systems map and an honest read — including if that read is that you do not need us.
What to expect
Prefer email?
support@cyberxsolutions.us