Services
Contracted advisory and technical services
Under our filed management consultancy activity, each item below is a defined piece of work with named deliverables, an agreed scope and stated exclusions. What is written below is what goes into the statement of work; if something you need is not here, say so in the enquiry and we will tell you plainly whether it is work we take on.
A-01
Custom Software Development
Business applications built to a written specification, for organisations whose process does not fit anything sold off the shelf.
We design, build and hand over software that a client organisation owns outright: internal tools, operational back offices, reporting systems, and the integrations that sit between them. Work runs against a specification agreed before development starts, in short increments, with source code and documentation delivered to the client throughout.
What the work covers
- Requirements analysis and a written functional specification agreed before any code is committed
- Solution and data-model design, including how the system will be operated after handover
- Implementation in the increments described in the statement of work, with running software at the end of each
- Automated tests covering the behaviour the specification calls out
- Technical documentation, deployment instructions and a handover session with the client's own team
What you receive
Commercial model
Fixed-scope statement of work, or time and materials against an agreed rate card. Both are set out in a written contract before work begins.
This is contracted development for an organisation. It is not a consumer service and we do not repair, recover or support software belonging to members of the public.
A-02
Enterprise IT Consulting
Independent technical advice for management teams deciding what to build, what to buy and what to retire.
Advisory work for organisations that need a technical opinion they can act on: reviewing an existing estate, comparing options against cost and risk, and writing the decision down in a form a board can approve. We sell no licences and take no commission from any vendor, so a recommendation to buy nothing is a normal outcome.
What the work covers
- Review of an existing application estate, its integrations and its operational burden
- Technology selection: options compared on total cost, operational risk, hiring market and exit cost
- Architecture review of a system already in production or already designed
- Delivery process review — how work is specified, tested, released and supported
- A written report with findings, options and a recommendation, addressed to the people who will decide
What you receive
Commercial model
Fixed-fee assignment with an agreed scope and reporting date, or a retained advisory arrangement with a defined monthly commitment.
We give technical advice. We do not give investment, tax, legal or medical advice, and we do not build systems that give such advice to the public.
A-03
Cloud Infrastructure & Architecture Solutions
Infrastructure designed as something the client can operate, describe in code, and leave if they choose to.
We design and implement the environments applications run in — networking, compute, storage, deployment pipelines, backup and recovery — and describe them in configuration the client keeps. The design deliverable includes what it costs to run and what it costs to move away, because both are decisions the client is entitled to make with full information.
What the work covers
- Target architecture for a workload, with the operating cost estimated and the assumptions written down
- Infrastructure described as code, so the environment can be rebuilt from the repository
- Deployment pipelines that build, test and release without manual steps
- Backup, restore and recovery procedures — and a documented test of the restore, not only of the backup
- Migration planning for moving an existing workload, including the rollback route
What you receive
Commercial model
Fixed-scope design assignment, or an implementation statement of work with agreed milestones.
We are not a reseller and we hold no vendor partner accreditation. Cloud services are contracted by the client directly with the provider, in the client's own account, on the provider's terms.
A-04
API Integration & Legacy System Modernisation
Connecting systems that were never designed to talk, and moving old ones forward without a rewrite nobody can afford.
Integration and modernisation work on systems that are already load-bearing. We map what the existing system actually does, put an interface in front of it, and move functionality across in stages that each leave the business running. A full replacement is sometimes the answer, but it is a conclusion we reach in writing rather than an assumption we start from.
What the work covers
- Interface design and implementation — REST, message queues, scheduled data exchange, file-based transfer
- Documented API contracts, versioned so a consumer is not broken by a change
- Behaviour mapping of a legacy system, including the undocumented behaviour that turns out to matter
- Incremental modernisation: strangler-pattern replacement, with each stage independently releasable
- Data migration with reconciliation, so the two sides can be proved to agree
What you receive
Commercial model
Discovery assignment first, priced separately, followed by a statement of work informed by what discovery found.
We work on systems the client owns or is contractually entitled to modify. We do not circumvent licence terms, and we do not redistribute software we are not authorised to distribute.
A-00
Work we do not accept
A standing refusal, published rather than handled case by case. It is part of our terms and conditions.
- We do not provide technical support to consumers, and we do not service equipment or software belonging to the general public.
- We do not offer password recovery, account recovery or credential reset services for accounts we do not administer under a signed contract.
- We do not offer remote desktop repair, device clean-up, virus removal or any similar consumer break-fix service.
- We are not affiliated with, and we do not act as an authorised support channel for, Microsoft, Apple, Google or any other software vendor.
- We do not accept work for gambling, adult content, tobacco or vaping, weapons, or multi-level marketing businesses.
- We do not build or operate systems that give investment, tax, legal or medical advice to the public, and we do not offer such advice ourselves.
- We do not resell, sublicense or supply third-party software licences.
Two reasons. It saves everyone the time of an enquiry that would be declined. And it removes any ambiguity about what kind of business this is: the phrase "IT services" covers both contracted enterprise engineering and consumer break-fix support, and only the first of those describes us.
We hold no vendor partner accreditation and we are not an authorised support channel for any software product. Where a client's problem is properly a matter for a product vendor, we say so.
Next step
Start with the problem, not the solution
The most useful first message describes what is not working and what it is costing. Which of the four services applies — if any of them does — is our job to work out.