Strategic IT advice, from operators.

Project work that doesn’t fit inside a managed-services contract. Typical engagements: vendor selection (RFP support, shortlist evaluation, contract review), M&A IT due diligence (target-environment assessment, risk register, day-one and day-100 integration plan), architecture reviews (cloud landing zones, identity, networking, security posture), and compliance roadmaps (Essential Eight, ISO 27001, APRA CPS 234, SOC 2 readiness — gap analysis and remediation plan, not the audit itself). We also do vCIO engagements where a business wants senior IT leadership without hiring a full-time CIO. The honest limitation: we’re operators, not management consultants. If you need a 200-page strategy deck with a brand-name logo on the cover, we’re the wrong firm. We write recommendations the engineering team can actually execute.

No. We take standalone consulting engagements regularly, and for many clients that’s how the relationship starts — a discrete piece of advisory work, with no expectation that it leads anywhere else. If it makes sense to move into managed services afterwards, that’s a separate conversation with a separate scope. If it doesn’t, the consulting engagement ends cleanly with a deliverable you own. We don’t bundle consulting fees into a back-door sales process for the managed-services contract. The honest limitation: where a consulting engagement uncovers urgent remediation work — a critical exposure, a failing backup, a misconfigured tenant — we’ll quote that remediation separately. We’ll also tell you if it’s something another provider could do more cheaply.

Written recommendations, risk-rated, with the reasoning behind each one, not a slide deck. A typical engagement produces a report covering the current-state assessment, the findings (each tagged by severity and effort), a prioritised remediation plan with rough cost ranges, and the decisions we’d recommend the executive team take. Where the engagement is a vendor selection, the deliverable is a scored shortlist against your weighted criteria, with a recommended supplier and the trade-offs documented. The point that matters: we don’t sell our own products inside the recommendation. If the right answer is a tool we don’t resell or a path we don’t deliver, the report says so. Advice from a consultancy that earns margin on the recommended outcome is structurally compromised, and we’ve designed the practice to avoid that.

Fixed-scope project pricing, scoped per engagement. We don’t sell consulting on a time-and-materials drip. Every engagement starts with a one-page scoping conversation, followed by a written statement of work covering the questions we’re answering, the artefacts we’ll produce, the people we’ll need access to, and the fixed price for the work. If scope changes mid-engagement, we re-quote the change rather than running a meter. Why fixed-price: it puts the planning risk on us, not on you. The honest limitation: that only works when the scope is genuinely well-understood. For genuinely open-ended discovery work — early-stage M&A, novel architectures, unfamiliar regulatory environments — we’ll quote a small, fixed-price discovery sprint first and re-scope the main engagement off that.