How an engagement actually runs
Most consultancies will not tell you this before you sign. It is the thing you most need to know, so here it is in order.
A senior engineer reads it and replies within one business day. Or write to emilio@lyticaconsulting.com.
Nothing below is aspirational. If an engagement with us stops looking like this, you should say so, and we should fix it.
The first month
Before we start
A scoping call
Thirty to sixty minutes, with the engineer who would do the work. We ask what is broken, what you have already tried, and who else has to agree.
You leave with our read on whether this is the right piece of work to do first. Sometimes that means telling you the thing you asked about is not your real problem, and occasionally it means telling you we are the wrong firm.
Week one
Access, and reading the system as it is
We get read access to your sources, your cloud account, and your billing. Then we spend the week reading the systems directly rather than the diagram of what they were meant to be.
The week ends with a written architecture read: what you have, what will break next, what we would build first, and what it costs to run today. You get this whether or not the engagement continues.
Weeks two and three
The first thing that actually runs
The first deliverable reaches your environment. Tested, monitored, and deployed through the same pipeline everything after it will use. We choose the piece that unblocks the most people, which is rarely the most interesting piece to build.
This is the point at which you can judge us on work rather than on conversation.
Week four onward
A cadence you can plan around
Two-week cycles. Each one ends with working software in your account and a written summary of what shipped, what did not, and what changed our minds.
Documentation and runbooks are written as the work happens. There is no separate handover phase to negotiate at the end, because by then it is already done.
A senior engineer reads it and replies within one business day. Or write to emilio@lyticaconsulting.com.
How we communicate
- A named engineer
- You have the direct contact of the person doing the work. Not a shared inbox, and not an account manager who relays questions.
- A written weekly summary
- What shipped, what is blocked, what it cost, and what we got wrong. It goes out even in the weeks where the honest answer is that progress was slow.
- Your tools, not ours
- We work in your Slack or Teams, your repository, and your ticket tracker. You should not have to log into a portal to find out how your project is going.
- Escalation to a person
- If something is going wrong, you raise it with the engineer or with Emilio directly. There is no tier above that to be transferred to.
How we hand over
The measure of the work is whether your team can run it after we stop.
- Everything in your accounts from day one
- Your cloud tenancy, your repository, your warehouse. We never hold the only copy of anything, and there is no environment of ours you depend on.
- Runbooks for the failure cases
- What to do when a load fails, a schema changes, or a cost spikes. Written for someone who was not in the room when it was built.
- Knowledge transfer as sessions, not a document dump
- Working sessions with your engineers, recorded, where they make the changes and we watch. Reading documentation is not the same as having done it once.
- A written exit note
- What we would do next, what we would not, and the parts we are least confident about. The last one is the useful one.
A senior engineer reads it and replies within one business day. Or write to emilio@lyticaconsulting.com.
How you would contract with us
Four shapes. Procurement usually wants to know how it ends, so that column is there too.
| Model | For | How it is scoped | How it ends |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fixed-scope project | A known outcome with a defined edge | Statement of work and fixed price, agreed before we start | On delivery and handover |
| Dedicated pod | Ongoing build where the roadmap will change | Monthly, by team composition | 30 days' notice |
| Assessment | A first engagement, or a second opinion | Fixed scope and fixed price, two to four weeks | When the roadmap is in your hands |
| Fractional leadership | Senior data judgment without a full-time hire | Days per month | 30 days' notice |
Start with a scoping call
Describe what you are trying to build and we will tell you what we think, before either of us has committed to anything.
Or write to emilio@lyticaconsulting.com