Strategic IT consulting, wherever your business runs

What working with an IT consultant actually looks like

Almost every engagement starts the same way, whatever it turns into: a bounded assessment. Not a proposal, not a discovery call with a quote attached — a fixed piece of work that produces three documents you keep regardless of what you decide next.

• A documented estate. What you actually have: systems, licences, contracts, renewal dates, and the connections between them. For most businesses this is the first time anyone has seen the whole thing written down in one place.
• A prioritised risk list. Ordered by what would actually hurt, not by what is easiest to sell. It is normal for several items on it to be free to fix, because the capability is already licensed and switched off.
• A costed plan. What to do, in what order, and what each step costs — including the option of doing nothing, with its consequences stated honestly.

Those documents are yours. If you take them to another provider, or hand them to an internal person and get on with it, the assessment still did its job. An assessment that only has value if you also buy the implementation is a sales exercise, and it produces different advice.

Where we work, and why remote is not a compromise

Most of this work has not needed anyone in the room for years. Identity, cloud tenancy, security policy, backup design and architecture are configured and reviewed through the same admin surfaces whether the consultant is upstairs or on another continent. What a remote engagement actually needs is discipline about the things proximity used to paper over — scheduled sessions rather than corridor conversations, decisions written down rather than agreed verbally, and access that is scoped, named and revoked on time. Those are better practices anyway — the case is made in full in our piece on remote IT consulting across timezones.

We are based in Somerset West, South Africa, on SAST (UTC+2): the same working day as Central Europe, an hour or two ahead of the UK, with a real afternoon overlap into the US East Coast. That timezone, English as a first working language, and senior people at sensible rates are the practical case for the region — we set it out in full in IT outsourcing to South Africa. On-site work is available across the Helderberg, Stellenbosch and greater Cape Town; everywhere else is remote, which is almost always what the work needs anyway.

Do you need a consultant, or do you need support?

Worth being blunt about, because the two get sold interchangeably and they are not the same purchase. If what you need is someone to answer the phone when a laptop breaks, that is support, it is a legitimate thing to want, and this is not it. If the problem is that decisions keep getting made in response to something breaking rather than to a plan, that is what a virtual CIO engagement exists to fix.

And if you already have a capable internal person who is simply out of hours in the day, the cheaper answer is usually to extend them rather than replace them. That is what co-managed IT support is for, and we set out how those arrangements are structured in the piece on co-managed IT.

Not sure which of those describes you? That is a reasonable place to start from, and it is the first thing the assessment answers. Browse the full list of IT services or read the Insights section, which is written to be useful whether or not you ever get in touch.