Week 0 · ScopingScope
A thirty-minute call, then a written scope of one page: the problem, what we would build first, what it costs and when we could start. You get a real number and a start date within a week — no procurement cycle to sit through, and no obligation once you have it.
Step 1 of 4Weeks 1–6 · PrototypePrototype
Something concrete you can use and react to, running on your data rather than a demo set. By the end of it we know whether the approach holds, and so do you. Roughly half our projects change direction here, which is the point of doing it first.
Step 2 of 4Months 2–6 · ProductionProduction
Hardening, integration and evaluation at volume. The timeline depends almost entirely on how much of your existing infrastructure it has to talk to — the model work is rarely the long pole. Your engineers are in the codebase throughout.
Step 3 of 4Ongoing · HandoverHandover
Documentation, runbooks and the evaluation harness, handed to the people who have been reviewing the work all along. Engagements run month to month after the first phase, so we stay only as long as we are useful.
Step 4 of 4