Consulting
The expensive decision is the first one
SpaltX reads what you already have and writes down what changing it would involve. Sometimes the answer is that the work should not be done, and that goes in writing in the same words the opposite would.
By the time a project is under way, most of what it will cost has already been settled by people who were choosing quickly. Which supplier, and whether to write it or buy it. Neither of those costs anything to change on the day it is chosen. Both are expensive a year later, and Consulting is buying back the afternoon nobody spent on them.
01 / What we are asked
Four questions, over and over
An assessment of what you already have, and what it would take to change it.
What would it take to change this?
An application nobody left notes on, or a part that has to be replaced and has no model anywhere. We read it and write down what changing it involves, including the parts we could not find out and what it would cost to find them out.
Is this estimate reasonable?
A proposal from somebody else, and nobody in the room can tell whether the number matches the work. We read the two against each other and tell you which parts of it we would have priced differently, and why.
Should this be built at all?
The question that saves the most money and gets asked the least, usually because by the time anybody is in the room the answer is assumed. Sometimes the thing already exists. Sometimes the problem is cheaper to live with than to solve.
Which way should we go?
Build it or buy it. Train a model or write the rules by hand. Print the part or send it out to be cut. Run it on your own hardware or on somebody else's. Each of these gets settled early, and usually by whoever was most confident in the room rather than by whoever had measured.
02 / When it pays for itself
Two situations worth the money
Nobody left notes
Whoever built it has gone, and the next change is a guess priced as a certainty. Reading unfamiliar work and saying plainly what is safe to touch is ordinary here, and it is much cheaper than the first wrong change.
Two quotes, one big gap
You are holding numbers that are far apart and no way to tell whether the cheap one misunderstood the job or the expensive one padded it. That gap is almost always a question nobody asked, and finding which question it was is most of the work.
03 / Where we stand
Read this before the rest
An assessment whose author had a stake, handed over as though they did not, is worth less than none.
We build things, so we are not neutral
A recommendation to build something is a recommendation that pays us. We would rather say that here than have you notice it later. When the answer is that you should not build it, it goes in the assessment in the same words we would use for the opposite.
We cannot review what we cannot see
We need the thing and not an account of it: the repository, the drawings, the model, or the data behind it. An assessment written from somebody's description of a system is an opinion about the description, and we will tell you that is what you are getting rather than charge for it as though it were not.
This is not management consulting
What we read is technical. Questions about org charts and about strategy are somebody else's work, and where yours turns out to be one of those we will say so early instead of answering it anyway.
There is no day rate
Consulting is scoped and quoted like every other engagement here, in a written proposal to one client. Nothing on this site carries a published figure, and a number for reading a system nobody has looked at yet would be a guess.
04 / What arrives
Something written down
A document you can hand to somebody who was not in the room. It says what we read, what we found, what we could not establish and what we would do about each of those. Where a recommendation rests on an assumption, the assumption is named next to it.
No slide deck, and no meeting where the findings are performed at you. If a conversation helps afterwards we will have it, but the conversation is not the deliverable and you should not have to take notes to keep what you paid for.
The person who would do the work, not a salesperson.
Common questions
- Does consulting have to lead to a build?
- No. Plenty of it ends with a recommendation to do nothing, or to go to somebody else, and that is a finished engagement rather than a failed one. The assessment is yours when it is paid for, and it is yours to take to whoever you like.
- Can SpaltX review work another supplier is doing right now?
- Yes, and it is worth saying up front that we sometimes end up recommending they carry on. Tell us whether they know the review is happening. An assessment written from half the story is worth less than none, and we would rather ask for the other half than guess at it.
Bring us the question
What you are deciding, what you have that we could read, who has looked at it already, and when the decision has to be made. Say that the ask is an assessment rather than a build, and pick whichever of the four lines it concerns.