How we work
Frame, Prove, Build, Hand over
Four phases with an exit agreed at the start. The last part is the one that changes how the first three are built.
01 · 1–2 weeks
Frame
Establish what is actually constrained, what success would look like, and whether we should proceed at all.
- Inspect the data and infrastructure directly rather than relying on documentation.
- Classify risk against the frameworks your regulator cares about.
- Agree the exit criteria in writing, before any code exists.
- Cost the options, including doing nothing.
Out · Feasibility note · Risk register · Costed options · Written exit criteria
02 · 3–6 weeks
Prove
Get one thin end-to-end path running on your infrastructure, with measurement attached from the first week.
- Build the narrowest slice that touches every layer, including identity and logging.
- Construct the evaluation set with your subject-matter experts.
- Deploy into your environment early, so integration pain surfaces now rather than in month four.
- Record architecture decisions as they are made.
Out · Working vertical slice · Evaluation baseline · Architecture decision records · Revised estimate
03 · 8–16 weeks
Build
Turn the slice into something that can be operated, audited and changed by people who were not there.
- Harden identity, authorisation, observability and release.
- Extend evaluation into a regression gate that can block a merge.
- Load-test against your peak, not your average.
- Security review, adversarial testing and rollback rehearsal.
Out · Deployed system · Regression gate in CI · Runbook from the incident log · Security review record
04 · 2–4 weeks
Hand over
Demonstrate (not assert) that your team can deploy, diagnose, evaluate and explain the system.
- Your engineers drive; we observe and take notes.
- Injected failure in staging, handled by your team.
- Your team extends the evaluation set and interprets the result.
- Final documentation written wherever they hesitated.
Out · Demonstrated capability · Completed runbook · Agreed support arrangement, if wanted
Who is on the team
Not everyone is present throughout. The composition changes by phase, and the governance specialist arriving in Frame rather than at go-live is the single change that most improves an outcome.
| Role | Present from | What they own |
|---|---|---|
| Engagement lead | All phases | Owns the outcome and the honest status report. Usually also writing code. |
| AI engineer | Prove onward | Serving, retrieval, tool integration, and the software engineering around the model. |
| Data scientist | Frame onward | Evaluation design, adjudication process, agreement measurement, analysis. |
| Platform engineer | Prove onward | Deployment path, observability, release and rollback, in your tooling. |
| Governance specialist | Frame onward | Risk classification, oversight design, evidence pack. |
| Data engineer | As needed | Pipelines, contracts, lineage where the substrate needs work first. |
Working agreements
- · We work in your repositories, under your review process, with your standards. Not in a parallel codebase handed over at the end.
- · Architecture decision records for anything material, including rejected options and what would justify revisiting them.
- · A weekly demonstration of working software, not a status deck.
- · Scope changes are visible and costed. Nothing gets quietly added or quietly dropped.
- · Bad news travels immediately. A slipping estimate is more useful in week three than in week nine.
When we say no
We decline engagements where an on-premises approach is clearly the wrong answer and a hosted service would serve you better; where the requirement is an agent with standing authority to take irreversible action without human oversight; where the timeline only works if evaluation is skipped; and where the real problem is a data platform that needs fixing first.
Start with the constraint.
Most of these projects are shaped by what you cannot do rather than what you want. Data that cannot leave the estate, a model you cannot host with a third party, a decision somebody has to justify to a regulator. Tell us yours and we will say honestly whether we can work inside it.