Services · SIC 62020
Everything below is consultancy. We are not a software house with a consulting arm and we hold no reseller agreements, so each line is written the way we would want it written if we were the ones buying: what it covers, what it deliberately does not, what you receive at the end, and what we need from you to do it properly.
Most organisations have never had anybody independent look at the whole estate at once. Systems accumulate: one bought by finance, one inherited from a departed manager, one written years ago by somebody's nephew. An assessment puts all of it on a single page and tells you, in order, what deserves your attention.
An assessment is a review, not a repair. We do not remediate what we find, we do not configure or install anything, and we do not perform penetration testing — where a genuine security test is warranted, we say so and help you scope it for a specialist testing firm. We also stop short of auditing your finances; if a licence looks over-purchased we will say so, but the numbers remain yours to verify.
An hour each with three or four people who use the systems daily, read-only access where an interface tells us more than a description would, a list of what you currently pay for, and one person empowered to answer questions between sessions.
Bad systems are rarely the result of bad programming. They are the result of nobody ever writing down how the pieces were meant to fit together, so each supplier made a reasonable local decision and the whole became incoherent. This line exists to produce that missing document before the money is spent.
We do not write the code, configure the platform or manage the build. The design is deliberately vendor-neutral: where a category of product is required we describe the category and the selection criteria rather than naming a favourite, and if you want help choosing within that category, that is the vendor selection line below.
“Move to the cloud” is not a decision; it is a category of decisions, each with a different bill attached. Our job is to put the realistic figures next to each other, be explicit about the assumptions holding them up, and tell you which parts of the estate genuinely benefit — because some of them will not.
We do not perform the migration, hold your cloud accounts, or resell hosting of any kind. We hold no partner status with any provider, which is precisely why the appraisal is worth reading. Where a figure depends on something only the provider can confirm, we label it as an estimate rather than presenting it as fact.
Small and mid-sized organisations rarely lose their data to a sophisticated attack. They lose it to a shared password, a leaver whose account was never disabled, or a backup that had been failing silently for eleven months. This review looks for those, not for headlines.
This is a review, not a penetration test and not a formal certification audit. We do not attempt to break into your systems, and we do not issue Cyber Essentials or ISO 27001 certificates — where you need either, we will tell you plainly and help you prepare for the body that does. We also do not implement the fixes; the remediation list is written so your existing IT support can act on it directly.
The usual symptom is a board pack where the sales figure does not match the finance figure, and an hour is lost every month reconciling them by hand. The usual cause is not a broken system but two reasonable definitions of the same word. We trace the numbers and write the definitions down.
We do not build dashboards, write ETL pipelines or administer your reporting tools, and we do not sell a data platform. We are also not accountants: where a definition has a statutory or accounting meaning, we defer to your accountant and record their answer rather than inventing one.
Selection processes usually fail at the first step: the requirements are written loosely enough that every supplier can answer yes to everything, so the decision falls back to whoever demonstrated best. We write requirements that separate the field, and a scoring method that survives being questioned afterwards.
Once a supplier is appointed, we can stay on as your side of the table: reviewing what is delivered against the acceptance criteria, attending progress meetings, and telling you when an explanation does not hold up. We take no fee from the supplier and no share of their contract, so our only interest is whether you got what you paid for.
We are not a procurement agency, we do not sign contracts on your behalf, and we do not provide legal advice — the contract points we raise are for your solicitor to draft. And we never bid for the delivery work ourselves, which is what makes it possible for us to judge it.
One decision, answered properly, in a short paper. Suited to a board that needs an independent read on a proposal, or an operations lead facing one significant choice.
Shape One question · one document
Fee Fixed, quoted after scoping
The estate reviewed end to end, ending in a findings report and a prioritised programme. Suited to a new finance or operations director inheriting an unfamiliar set of systems.
Shape Estate review · findings report
Fee Fixed, quoted after scoping
A recurring day or half-day for organisations with no internal technology lead — decisions handled as they arrive, supplier work reviewed, and a written record kept of what was decided and why.
Shape Recurring day · rolling term
Fee Monthly · one month's notice
Next step
Describe the situation in an email. Part of the free scoping call is telling you which of the six applies — or that none of them does, and what you should do instead.