IT evolves organically — systems get added, teams grow, data accumulates, decisions get deferred. After a few years, no one has the full picture. Start with an honest assessment of your technology, your data, and your team. Plan what needs to change. Bring in senior leadership to deliver it when you need it. You pick where you start.
Most companies that engage us don't have their IT on fire. They have a quieter problem: IT grew to match the business as it was, and no one's stepped back to check if it still fits where the business is going.
You're being asked questions IT can't fully answer. "Are we secure enough?" "What's our cloud strategy?" "Why are we spending X?" — without an independent view, the answers sound defensive.
Systems got added over years, each for good reasons. Now no one has the full map. Integrations are patchy, ownership is unclear, and the team's running on institutional memory.
Your IT Director is leaving, taking a sabbatical, moving to another role, or you've been running without one. Six months without senior IT leadership compounds quickly.
You've scaled past the IT you built for an earlier stage. What worked at 50 people doesn't work at 200. Systems, team, and governance all need to catch up.
Something surfaced gaps. Or you're heading into an audit, certification, or investor diligence and realise the house isn't quite in order.
Most IT assessments stop at technology. Ours looks at three dimensions at once — the systems you run, how your data and organisation are structured, and whether the team you have can run the future you need. The output isn't a scorecard. It's a map from where you are to where you need to be, with the gap between them made explicit.
Each dimension gets the same treatment: we establish the current state, define the target state based on your business trajectory, then identify the gap and what it would take to close it.
What you run, and how well it's running.
The systems, infrastructure, and security posture that run your business today. Including the parts no one talks about — end-of-life servers, integrations held together by scripts, vendor contracts no one's renegotiated in three years.
Typical findings: two to four systems nobody's audited in years, one vendor lock-in they'd forgotten about, and a security gap that's been on the "we should fix that" list since someone left three years ago.
How information moves, and where it lives.
Where your information actually lives, how it moves between systems, and whether that structure still fits how your business works today. The hardest dimension to see from the inside, because the people closest to it built it.
Typical findings: three copies of the customer list, two systems-of-record competing for the same data, and a reporting pipeline that breaks quietly when someone renames a field. The data usually isn't wrong. It's just not organised for the way the business works now.
Whether your team can run what you have, and what you need next.
Roles and capabilities — not performance reviews. Can the team you have run the current setup well? More importantly: can it run where you're heading? Gaps here usually take longer to close than technology gaps, which is why we surface them early.
We speak in roles and capabilities, never in individual performance. The assessment report names gaps in the org chart, not names in the team.
Typical findings: two missing roles that should exist, one role that's over-scoped for one person, and a succession risk no one's planned for. The future-state usually needs one or two senior hires the company hasn't budgeted for yet.
"Where you need to be" isn't a theoretical maturity model. It's derived from three specific inputs:
Growth plans, regulatory obligations, M&A activity, new market entry. What the business will demand of IT in 2–3 years.
What comparable companies at your stage have typically found necessary. Used where it's useful, ignored where it's not.
Challenges and risks that only become visible during the engagement itself — the ones nobody flagged because nobody had stepped back to look.
Duration depends on complexity, not on a fixed template. We scope after a first call — below are typical ranges:
3–5 days
Companies ~20–50 people, single-site, straightforward IT landscape. Output: condensed findings report, prioritised gap list, executive summary.
1–2 weeks
Companies ~50–200 people, moderate complexity, some regulated processes. Output: full three-dimension report, target-state profile, prioritised roadmap, board-ready presentation.
3–4 weeks
Companies 200+, multi-site, regulated or multi-entity environments. Output: full three-dimension report, detailed gap analysis, investment framing, executive and operational deliverables.
About half our assessment clients take the findings and execute internally. About a third continue into a Strategy & Roadmap engagement to plan the changes in depth. A smaller group brings us in directly as Interim IT Director to deliver. There's no upsell pressure built into the process.
Most IT strategy documents are slide decks that get nodded at once and shelved. A useful strategy is different: specific about what changes and when, honest about what it costs and who does it, and structured so a new CFO or IT Director can pick it up two years in and still execute against it. Built to outlast the person who commissioned it.
Same discipline as the Assessment: three co-equal dimensions. The plan itself. The people who'll deliver it. The investment case that makes it viable.
What changes, in what order, and why.
The technical and architectural direction, made concrete. Not "we should modernise our infrastructure" — specifically which systems change, which stay, what replaces what, and in what sequence.
A real roadmap tells you what to do in Q1, Q2, Q3, and why. A useful one also tells you what to stop doing — the projects and contracts that were defensible five years ago and no longer are.
Who delivers it, and how they're shaped to do so.
Every strategy needs people to execute it. Most strategy documents wave at this. Ours is explicit: what capabilities you need, when, whether they're hired or trained or outsourced, and what the org chart looks like at each stage of the plan.
A strategy that needs five senior hires in year one is either wrong or unfunded. We model the realistic hiring cadence and adjust the plan's sequencing accordingly.
What it costs, over what timeline, and how to defend it.
Strategy without a credible budget is aspiration. We build multi-year investment plans that translate the roadmap into annual spend, broken down into categories a CFO can actually work with — and packaged into a business case a board can approve.
The investment case has to work at two levels: the total multi-year commitment, and each annual slice on its own. Both should be defendable in a boardroom without the rest of the deck.
If you've done our Assessment, the Strategy & Roadmap is faster — typically 1–2 weeks — because the current-state picture is already built and agreed. If you're coming in cold, or your state is already well-understood internally, we can start directly with the strategy work in a 2–4 week engagement. Either path produces the same final deliverables.
Most clients execute the roadmap internally — that's the intent. Some ask us to stay on as Interim IT Director to deliver the first phases, particularly when the plan depends on senior leadership the company doesn't yet have. Either path works. The strategy is yours either way.
Some engagements don't end at the strategy document. Sometimes the plan depends on senior IT leadership the company doesn't currently have — during a transition, a growth phase, or a period between permanent hires. When that's the case, we stay on as Interim IT Director: embedded in the leadership team, accountable for outcomes, and with a clear handover path to whoever takes over permanently.
Interim engagements aren't theoretical. Below are the four situations that drive most of them — usually in combination, rarely in isolation.
Your IT Director has left, is leaving, or has moved to another role. You need senior coverage while recruiting their permanent replacement — or while deciding whether the role should stay the same shape.
An acquisition, reorganisation, or system migration is underway. The current team needs leadership-level support during the transition, even if the long-term structure is already clear.
The company has outgrown the IT leadership it had. You need someone operating at director level now, while you figure out what a permanent hire should look like — often a different role than the one that existed before.
You've built a strategy (with us or internally) and the early phases need senior oversight that the current team can't provide. Interim engagement spans the first 6–12 months of execution.
2–3 days per week, ongoing
For companies needing director-level presence without a full-time salary commitment.
6–18 months, handing over
For succession gaps, active transitions, or roadmap execution phases.
1–2 days per month
For companies with strong day-to-day IT management but needing senior independent oversight.
Embed with the team. Understand current state, active issues, stakeholder dynamics. Identify the first three things worth fixing.
Clear the most visible operational issues. Establish cadence with leadership and governance. Build trust with the team before asking for bigger changes.
Execute against the roadmap, adjust as reality demands. Prepare the organisation — and the role itself — for a permanent hire when the time is right.
Two engagements are active — one with a Nordic life-science company, one with a Swedish medtech group — and a third starts shortly with a European clinical research organisation. We pick these engagements carefully: senior attention matters more than volume, and we'd rather turn work down than dilute it.
We're not a staffing agency. We don't place IT contractors. An Interim IT Director engagement is a senior consulting relationship with an embedded presence — not body-shopping a resource into your org chart. That means longer scoping conversations up front, genuine fit checks both ways, and a real handover plan. It also means we don't take every engagement that's offered.
Interim engagements end one of three ways: the permanent hire arrives and we hand over; the scope narrows to advisory as the new team stabilises; or the original plan evolves and we scope a new engagement shape together. The intent from day one is a clean handover — not an open-ended extension.
The three stages are designed to sequence — Assessment surfaces what needs to change, Strategy plans the changes, Interim delivers them. In practice, most clients don't do all three. The structure exists to give you a clear entry point without committing you to a path you haven't chosen yet.
Roughly half of clients.
A clear, independent picture of where the IT function is, where it needs to be, and what it takes to close the gap. Some clients take the findings and execute internally with their existing team. Some share the report with their board and revisit in six months. Some shelve it deliberately because the assessment surfaced bigger questions first.
About a third.
The assessment surfaces the shape of the problem; the strategy engagement turns it into a plan with sequencing, investment, and capability roadmap. Execution stays internal. We've sometimes reviewed the execution at 6-month intervals; that's optional and separate.
The remaining clients.
Either the full journey — assessment, strategy, interim delivery — or a direct engagement because the company already knows what it needs. These are longer relationships, usually 12+ months total across stages.
Most consultancies' engagement models are upsell ladders. Ours isn't — we make more revenue per client when they engage across stages, but we make better engagements when clients only do the stages they actually need. Sometimes the best outcome of an Assessment is a clear report, a board conversation, and nothing else. That's a successful engagement.
Most engagements start with a 30-minute scoping call — no commitment, no pitch deck. You tell us what's prompting the conversation, we tell you which stage makes sense and what a realistic engagement would look like. Sometimes the answer is "you don't need us yet." That's also a useful outcome.
Scope and independence. We assess technology, data, and team as three co-equal dimensions — most large-firm assessments stop at technology or run the team question as a separate and expensive workstream. We're also independent in the specific sense that we don't resell software, implement vendor products, or receive referral fees. Findings are unbiased because the commercial structure makes them unbiased.
Yes. The IT Strategy work is industry-agnostic — growth companies, regulated industries, professional services. Our deep expertise is in life-science and regulated sectors, and that experience translates well to companies with complex compliance, data-sensitivity, or multi-entity structures. But the assessment and strategy frameworks apply to any company that's scaling past its current IT setup.
Very. The team dimension of an assessment is genuinely sensitive — findings name capability gaps in an org chart, not individual people, but senior leadership still needs to handle them carefully. We operate under signed NDAs by default, and our deliverables are structured so that the raw team-capability analysis can be shared at CEO/Board level without circulating inside the IT function. Most clients keep the full report in a small circle.
Yes. The stages are described sequentially but the engagements are independent. You can do a standalone strategy engagement without an assessment, an interim engagement without either, or an assessment followed by a six-month pause before strategy work. We scope each engagement individually — no retainers, no forced packages.
For Assessment: typically within 2–3 weeks of a signed scope, sometimes faster for focused engagements. For Strategy: 2–4 weeks lead time. For Interim IT Director: longer — Interim engagements need proper fit conversations on both sides, so expect 4–6 weeks from first call to embedded start. If you need interim coverage faster than that, we may not be the right fit.
Assessment and Strategy & Roadmap engagements are fixed-price, typically five to six figures depending on scope. Interim IT Director runs on a monthly retainer based on engagement shape — part-time, full-time, or advisory. We quote specifically after a scoping call, not before.
We disclose this explicitly in every engagement. An assessment firm that benefits from "finding problems" has an incentive to find them. Our structural answer: assessment findings are costed independently, and we're equally happy if a client doesn't continue — roughly half don't. If that's not reassuring enough, some clients split: another firm does the assessment, we do the strategy. We support that explicitly.
Clients occasionally find the picture we return harder to look at than expected — usually on the team dimension. That's the point. We deliver findings in a format that supports a real conversation with the board and with the IT function itself, not as a blunt document that lands and causes problems. If findings are genuinely contested, we'll rework the analysis with the client's input before the report is finalised. The goal is accuracy, not confrontation.
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