Why this exists
Most firms will tell you they have a methodology. Fewer will show you what it is.
When technology risk sits on a transaction deadline or a business case, the difference between firms is rarely knowledge. It is whether the work is done the same way every time, by whoever is doing it, with the parts that get skipped under pressure built in as gates rather than good intentions.
This is our method. It is the same document our practitioners are trained on, with the internal detail removed.
The shape of the work
Our two practices sit at different points on one arc.
Transition Advisory operates on a deal clock. A close date is a contractual fact and it does not move. The discipline is sequencing and readiness.
Managed Modernization operates on a business case clock. The schedule bends but the value case has to survive the bending. The discipline is benefits defense.
Talent On-Demand is what makes both deliverable. Most boutiques cannot staff what they plan. Most staffing firms cannot plan what they staff.
Five steps, applied consistently
1. Clarify the business outcome
We start by establishing what decision the work has to support, and when. Not "assess the IT estate" — what will you decide, on what date, and what would change your mind.
This produces the scope. It also produces the honest conversation about what is achievable in the time available, which is better had in week one than in week six.
2. Assess the technology landscape
We do not accept the inventory.
Application estates are reconciled across four independent sources: the existing inventory, accounts payable data, identity provider logs, and network traffic. Each finds what the others miss. The gap between them is itself a finding, and it is usually a large one.
The same principle applies throughout. Configuration databases are treated as a hypothesis. Coverage percentages are checked for what is in the denominator. A control that is documented is not the same as a control that operates.
3. Build the execution roadmap
Plans are built by the people who will deliver them. We provide the structure, the milestone standard, the dependency discipline, and the challenge.
Three things are non-negotiable in any plan we put our name to:
- Milestones have binary completion criteria. If it cannot be judged complete or not complete, it is a phase label.
- Dependencies are two-sided records. Both the providing and the receiving owner acknowledge, with a date. A dependency owned by one side is a hope.
- Every milestone links to value or to a continuity obligation. Those that link to neither are descope candidates. Applying this test typically removes ten to twenty percent of a first-draft plan.
4. Mobilize the right expertise
Every practitioner we place is vetted on three dimensions, all required: technical depth assessed by someone in the same specialty, delivery track record probed for outcomes rather than participation, and two references from people who directly observed their work.
References are the step most often skipped under time pressure. We treat them as a gate.
Every placement is onboarded to this methodology in their first week, and a named SEG person stays accountable for the engagement after it starts.
Where we cannot staff a role well, we say so. That conversation costs us a placement and it is the right one.
5. Drive through delivery
This is where the method earns its keep, and where we are most specific.
Cutover discipline. Runbooks with clock times, named owners per task, and three states rather than two: started, completed, and verified. Verification is a separate action by a separate person, because cutovers fail when completion is claimed and verification is assumed.
Rehearsal. Two full dress rehearsals before any Day 1 event. The first one fails; that is its purpose. Corrected runbooks are commonly thirty to fifty percent longer than the original estimate, and finding that at T-minus-eight-weeks is a good outcome.
Go/no-go criteria agreed in advance. Published before the readiness assessments begin. Criteria written at the go/no-go meeting produce the answer people want rather than the answer that is true.
Readiness measured, not felt. A weighted composite of things that can be counted — requirements with acceptance criteria, critical path completion, test pass rates, rehearsal defect closure, dependency and consent closure, open severity issues. RAG ratings drift toward whatever is politically comfortable. A number does not.
Hypercare exits on criteria, never on a date. Issue volume below a defined threshold, no open severity one or two issues, business sign-off, support fully transitioned. Hypercare that ends because thirty days elapsed pushes unresolved problems into a support organization that is not staffed for them.
Four commitments
These are what we hold ourselves to, and they are the ones most likely to be quietly dropped elsewhere.
We tell you early
A risk raised in week four is a discussion. The same risk in week eleven is a crisis. We would rather deliver an unwelcome assessment while options still exist than a comfortable one that leaves you with fewer.
This includes recommending that a program stop, when that is the right answer.
We report claimed and verified separately
Program-reported savings and finance-verified savings are different numbers, and the gap between them is usually large. It comes from contracts not terminated, hosting not cancelled, and costs moved rather than eliminated.
We report both, every time, and we invite the quarterly reconciliation with your finance function rather than avoiding it.
Green requires evidence
A workstream reporting green must be able to produce the evidence. We ask every time, as process rather than as challenge.
Self-reported green with no evidence requirement is the mechanism by which programs fail suddenly after months of apparent health.
We finish
The last ten percent of every engagement is where the value actually lands, and it is the part most consultants skip because the interesting work is over.
Retiring an application means terminating the licence, the hosting, and the support contract — not switching it off. Exiting a transition services agreement means decommissioning the underlying capability, or the exit delivers no financial benefit at all. Closing a program means certifying benefits with finance, handing over with documented owners, and formally standing governance down.
We plan for this, we fund it, and we track it to the ledger.
What we produce
Every engagement produces, at minimum: a charter, an integrated workplan, a RAID log, a decision log, a milestone register, a reporting pack, and a closeout report.
Everything else is specific to the work. Diligence produces a report, a financial baseline, a one-time cost model with ranges, and a contract register with assignability flags. A separation produces a perimeter register, an entanglement analysis, standalone and stranded cost models, and TSA schedules with exit plans. A modernization produces a debt register, target standards, a phased roadmap, and a decommissioning tracker.
No deliverable leaves us without: every material number traceable to a source or a stated assumption, ranges where confidence does not support a point estimate, named individual owners on every recommendation and risk, and review by a second SEG practitioner.
Who we work with
Leaders managing technology, transactions, and consequence in the same week.
We scale the method rather than abandoning it. A mid-market transaction does not get a sixteen-week planning phase, and it does get the same three things that never compress at any size: at least one end-to-end dress rehearsal before Day 1, go/no-go criteria agreed in advance, and verification that claimed savings actually left the ledger.
A note on what this is not
This method does not make hard programs easy. Separations are harder than integrations. ERP programs fail on organizational causes far more often than technical ones. Cloud business cases are usually lost to dual-running that nobody decommissioned, not to anything that happened during migration.
What the method does is make the failure modes visible early enough to act on, and remove the ones that come from work not being finished.
Working through a transaction or a modernization program?
We can walk you through how this method applies to your specific situation.
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