Solutions / 04
Support and consulting
IT consulting and ongoing technical support. Sometimes the right answer is not to build something new: it is working out what to keep, what to replace and in what order.
The problem
Many companies have accumulated systems that do not talk to each other, a different supplier for every piece and nobody holding the whole picture. Every technical decision turns into a gamble, and in the end nobody decides anything.
Examples
What it looks like once it is handed over.
Not one project: below are six kinds of work that fall under this service, drawn one by one and shown two at a time. If yours resembles one of them, the starting point already exists.
Assessment
What you actually have, put in order
Programmes, licences, data and integrations inventoried one by one, with what each one carries and what each one risks beside it. At the end, a list of things to do, in the order worth doing them.
- Inventory of systems
- Risks in order of weight
- A staged plan
Monitoring
The watch that runs through the night
Automated checks every few minutes on everything that has to stay up. When something stops answering the alert goes out, and more often than not the problem is closed before the office opens.
- Checks every 5 minutes
- Alerts straight away
- A monthly report
Releases
Updates that do no damage
Every change goes through the same gates and lands first on a staging environment identical to yours. Only what has been seen working reaches production, and it can be rolled back in a minute.
- A staging environment
- Released out of hours
- Rollback in a minute
Support desk
Support requests, tracked
One place to raise an issue and watch its state, instead of an email chain where it stops being clear who owed what to whom. With response times measured rather than promised.
- History of requests
- Response times measured
- One named contact
Remedial work
A plan to get out of it, not a list of complaints
Everything that needs putting right on one board, in columns that run from "seen" to "done". Every row carries a cost and a priority, so it is clear what happens now and what can wait.
- Priorities agreed
- An estimate per item
- Progress in the open
Takeover
Taking over from whoever was there before
Code, credentials, data and documentation taken on without stopping the company. The old system stays up until the new one has proved it holds, and the data moves across exactly once.
- Migration verified
- No downtime
- Credentials back in your hands
A drawing of the interface. The real installations sit behind a login, and that is where they stay.
What we build
Process analysis
We map how the work actually flows, which rarely matches how it is supposed to flow, and point out where software can take friction away, in order of impact.
Choosing the solution
An impartial comparison between products already on the market and custom development, with licence, adoption and exit costs written down before anything is signed.
Reviewing existing software
A review of what you run today: soundness, security, performance, future maintenance cost, and the risk of depending on a single supplier.
Ongoing support
A steady technical contact for reports, fixes and small improvements, with response times graded by severity.
Taking over from another supplier
We pick up projects built by others, with an honest inventory of what is there and a plan to make it safe without switching the company off.
What we deliver
The output of a consulting engagement is a document you can decide with: issues in priority order, a documented comparison of the options and a plan broken into stages, each with its own estimate.
When the relationship continues as support, the contract states the service levels and the systems we take on stay documented. The knowledge has to live in the company, not in one person's head.
What is included
What comes with the work, and is not billed separately.
Software does not end on the day it is handed over. These are the terms we work under on every project, written down before signing rather than treated as an extra to quote for six months later.
12 months of support included
On every project we deliver, at no extra cost.
12 months of support included
Every project we deliver comes with twelve months of support in the price: defect fixes, security updates and the small adjustments that only show up once people are using it. It is not a separate retainer to sign.
GDPR, in writing
A data processing agreement under art. 28 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679, the list of sub-processors, privacy notices and consent capture. If the project touches special category data, the impact assessment happens before any code is written.
Encrypted, and hosted in Europe
Traffic always over TLS, data and backups encrypted at rest, credentials in a secrets store and never in the code. Infrastructure sits in European regions unless you ask otherwise and we record it.
Least access, and it is logged
Roles, permissions and a second factor on anything that touches your systems. Every access is named and recorded, and when the project closes our credentials are revoked: it is a line on the handover checklist.
Backups somebody has actually restored
Daily copies, a retention period stated in the contract, and restore drills on a separate environment. A backup nobody has ever read back is not a backup; it is a hope.
The code and the data stay yours
Source, credentials, infrastructure and data are your property from day one, with the documentation to pick them up. No technical or contractual lock if you decide to go elsewhere.
Related services
Get started
Is there something in your processes worth automating?
Describe the situation in a few lines. We come back with an assessment of feasibility, timing and the order of magnitude of the cost.