CONSULTING
Audit your code.
Train your people.
Or build what's next.
Usually that requires three different firms. Alongside does all three, so the people who read your code are the same people who have to live with what gets built on it. Decades of experience, and millions saved for clients.
01 · Audit
Technical debt, in the code and in the process around it.
You already have software. Somebody built it, and nobody has read it since.
We find it the same way a building inspector finds mold: get rid of it, then put systems in place so it can't come back. The code is half of it. The other half is how work reaches your customers: how long a release takes, how many environments you are paying for, what breaks at seven on a Friday, and who gets called.
- A graded dossier. Every finding cites a file and a line and ships with a prompt that fixes it.
- What it is currently costing you, itemized, against what it should cost.
- The top three things worth doing first, in order, with a number on each.
- Then the findings can be fixed for you, if you would rather not fix it yourself: reviewable pull requests against your branch, closed out with a re-audit showing them resolved.
02 · Train
AI-assisted development, taught to your team.
Your team is using AI already. Nobody can tell you whether it is helping.
Directed badly, AI development can produce tens of thousands of lines of code nobody has ever read. Directed well, it compresses the timelines far enough to change what a budget can produce. Your team leaves with a working agreement, review standards written for code created by AI, the guardrails in your pipeline, and a before and after measured on your repository.
03 · Build
Built from your actual business, not from a disconnected wish list.
You are building something new, or rebuilding what a previous vendor left.
We already know what the technology can do, so our time goes into understanding your business. What a client asks for and what their business actually needs are frequently two different things, and the gap between them is where most software budgets die. We are also experts at finding the 20% that fixes 80% of your issues, driving customer satisfaction and saving you money.
- We embed with your team, in your repository and your standups, gaining insight you don't have the time or background to build yourself.
- Or built and handed over, we can audit your code and UI and provide you a detailed report on our findings.
- Inexpensive monthly re-audits are set up, so after we're gone you and your board have a trend line rather than a one time observation.
- Written to be read by whoever comes next, and handed over with whatever is left on the remediation list and the insight to clear them.
WHERE THE MONEY IS
The savings are rarely where people expect.
Four places, in more or less this order, on nearly every engagement we have taken.
Sized for a peak that never arrives, running at full capacity to serve a Tuesday night customer that doesn't exist.
Being done by hand, every week, by people who could be building something instead.
It fit the business four years ago. The business moved and the architecture didn't.
Quietly turned into an insurance premium somebody in finance now pays every year.
WHO YOU'RE WORKING WITH
Twenty-eight years of other people's software.
Rüadán Archer, Principal. Started in 1998 at Nortel, a 100,000-person telecom company and Cisco's biggest rival at the time. Since then: healthcare platforms carrying millions of transactions a year, cloud infrastructure for Fortune 500 names, a consultancy from 2017, and a director's chair with 23 people and millions in budget.
- Nortel Networks
- Verizon
- Party City
- Advantix
- Alegeus
- Samaritan Ministries
- Hattori Hanzo Shears
Employee at some, consultant at others, founder with a team behind him from 2017 to 2021. Which number below came from which name is between him and them.
Measuring0/9
HOW AN ENGAGEMENT WORKS
We look before we promise.
Nobody can price work on code they haven't seen. Anyone who quotes you before looking at what you already have is guessing, and you are the one who pays for the guess.
01
We read your code
Our own audit, run against your repository, plus what you are spending to run it, how long a change takes to reach your customers, and what has been going wrong. Scope and cost are settled before anything starts.
02
Identify the three largest findings
The three that pay, in the order we would do them, with a number on each. In plain English, in a document that is yours.
03
Do the work, or hand it to your team
Some clients have us lead it. Some hand the document to their own people and never call again. Both are fine. What we will not do is leave you dependent on us.
What the audit produces is yours, whether or not anything follows it. It is the only honest way to price the work, because a consultancy that quotes before reading your code is quoting a guess and you are the one carrying the risk.
LET'S TALK
What you are actually buying is judgment.
Which things are possible. Which are expensive. Which will not work at any price, no matter who is telling you otherwise. Knowing that before the money is committed is what nearly three decades and a mind built for systems buys you.
When the date is fiction and the vendor isn't delivering, protecting the plan becomes the job. We say so, in good faith. That has cost us work. It has never cost us a client.
Rüadán Archer, Principal
A call with us is free, and we will tell you up front if we are the wrong people for the job.