How We Work
What an engagement involves, what it costs, how long it takes and what you are left holding at the end of it. Written plainly, because being vague about this wastes your time and ours.
Three ways to work together, depending on how much ground you want covered.
Assessment
Two to three weeks. Discovery, mapping, gap analysis and a written recommendation. It concludes with a clear account of what is wrong, what it is costing you, and what addressing it would require, for a fixed fee. It is a reasonable way to find out whether the larger piece is worth commissioning.
Full engagement
Typically four to twelve weeks. All five stages for one function or one family of processes, with deliverables released in batches throughout rather than held to the end. Fixed fee, milestone based.
Retained advisory
An agreed number of days each month to keep documentation current, map new processes as they emerge, and deliver training as you hire. Suited to organizations that want the capability without adding the headcount.
What Drives the Cost
Four things, in roughly this order of significance.
- How many processes. Not how big the company is. A forty-person business with eleven tangled processes is a larger engagement than a three-hundred-person business with three clean ones.
- How many people we interview. Mapping accuracy comes from talking to the people who do the work, and that time is the bulk of the effort.
- How far through the stages you go. Mapping alone costs a fraction of mapping plus procedures plus built and delivered training.
- Whether documentation already exists. Sound material gets assessed and revised, which is cheaper and easier for your people to accept than a rewrite. Material describing a process that no longer exists is a rewrite, and we will say so.
What Happens, In Order
A conversation, no charge
You describe the situation. We tell you whether it is the right kind of problem for us, and roughly what addressing it would involve. Sometimes the answer is that you do not need us, and we would rather say so early.
A written proposal
Scope, stages, deliverables, timeline and fixed fee. No hourly estimates that drift.
Interviews and mapping
About ninety minutes per subject matter expert, with their supervisor present. This is where most of the discoveries happen.
Deliverables in batches
Released as they are finished rather than held to the end, so you get value before the engagement closes and can redirect us if something is not landing.
Handover
Everything in editable formats you own, plus the conventions for keeping it current after we leave.
What We Will Not Do
We will not guarantee a result. There are no guarantees in this work, because you have to do the work too and we are not a magic wand. What we will do is tell you honestly, before you commit, whether we think it will help.
Questions People Ask First
How much does business process documentation cost?
Most engagements fall between ten and twenty-five thousand dollars. What moves it inside that range is the number of distinct processes, the number of people who have to be interviewed, and whether training and delivery are included. We quote after the first conversation rather than publishing a rate card, because a rate card would be wrong for most of the organizations reading it.
How long does an engagement take?
An assessment runs two to three weeks. A full engagement covering one function or one family of processes typically runs four to twelve weeks. Retained advisory work is ongoing by arrangement.
What do you need from us?
Access to the people who perform the work, for about ninety minutes each, and a named person on your side who can make decisions. That is genuinely most of it. Engagements slow down when interviews are hard to schedule, not when the work is hard.
Do we own what you produce?
Entirely, in editable formats. Word, Markdown, or written directly into SharePoint, Confluence or your existing knowledge base. Nothing is held in a system that requires an ongoing payment to us in order to read it.
What size of organization do you work with?
Between fifty and a hundred employees is where this work pays off most clearly, and we go up to around five hundred. Below about twenty, the founders can usually handle it themselves and we would tell you so.
Do you work remotely?
Yes, and a good deal of the work is done that way. Mapping interviews and workshops are better in person where it is practical, because the discussion is richer and the discoveries are more frequent, but neither is a requirement.
Where would you want to start?
Describe the situation and we will tell you honestly whether we can help, and what it would take.