Approach
Go to the problem. Stay until it is solved.
Forward deployment is a simple idea that is hard to practise. It asks engineers to leave the comfort of their own tools, learn someone else’s business properly, and take responsibility for an outcome they do not fully control.
Principles
What we hold to on every engagement.
Embedded, not advisory
Our engineers work inside your organisation and are accountable for outcomes. We do not send recommendations from a distance.
Production, not presentation
The deliverable is a running system that the business relies on. Documents exist to support that system and for no other reason.
The operator is the client
Software succeeds when the person doing the job chooses to use it. We design with them from the first day.
Evidence before opinion
We measure before we argue. Evaluation harnesses, baselines and instrumentation come first, so that decisions rest on results.
Discretion as a default
We do not publish client names, case studies or logos. What happens inside an engagement stays there.
A short list, on purpose
Senior attention does not scale. We take on a limited number of engagements so that each one receives our best people.
Method
Five stages, from first meeting to handover.
Selection
We begin by deciding whether we should work together at all. We look for a problem that matters to the chief executive, an operator who owns it, and access to the systems and data involved. If any of the three is missing, we say so.
Immersion
Engineers sit with the people who do the work. They read the tickets, shadow the shifts, learn the vocabulary and trace the data to its source. Nothing is designed until the problem can be described in the operators’ own words.
Build
Working software on real data within weeks, put in front of the people who will use it, and revised in short cycles. We would rather be corrected early by an operator than praised late by a steering committee.
Production
Hardening, security review, monitoring, evaluation and on-call. A system is finished when the business depends on it and it holds.
Handover
Documentation, training and pairing with your own engineers, and help recruiting the permanent team. We plan our exit from the first week.
The engineers
Highly trained, and chosen for judgement.
A forward deployed engineer needs a combination of abilities that is rare in one person. They must be strong enough technically to build production systems alone if they have to, and curious enough about the business to understand why the system matters.
We select for that combination and then train for it. Our engineers are prepared in the domains we serve, in security and deployment under constraint, in evaluation, and in the quieter skills of interviewing an operator, reading an organisation, and telling a senior executive something unwelcome.
The firm deliberately presents itself as a firm. You will meet the people who will do your work before an engagement begins. We do not publish their names here, for the same reason we do not publish yours.
For clarity
What we do not do.
- We do not write strategy documents that nobody is asked to implement.
- We do not resell a platform, take referral fees from vendors, or favour one model provider over another.
- We do not staff engagements with junior people supervised from afar.
- We do not take on work we believe will fail, however well it pays.
Enquiries
The first conversation is about your problem and whether we are the right firm for it.
It commits neither of us to anything.
Request an engagement