Micro-Consulting
Senior architecture input, without a programme-sized commitment.
Sometimes the thing you need is not a consultancy engagement. It is two hours with someone who has already made this decision, several times, in an environment like yours — and will tell you plainly what they would do.
What a short engagement looks like.
Each of these is scoped before it starts, delivered in days rather than months, and ends with something written down that you can circulate without needing us in the room to explain it.
Advisory session
A single working session on a decision you are stuck on — platform choice, migration sequencing, an architecture your team cannot agree on. Followed by a written summary of what was recommended and why.
Architecture review
A scoped technical review with a findings report and prioritised recommendations — security posture, DevOps maturity, WAF and ingress design, or an existing platform you have inherited.
Supplier challenge
An independent read of a proposal, quote, or design you have been given, from someone with no margin in the outcome and no product to sell you.
Design sprint
A few focused days to take a problem from an idea to a design your team can build against, with the options analysis and the trade-offs recorded rather than assumed.
Assurance support
Help getting a design through a governance gate, a design authority, or an assurance board — including what the reviewers will ask and what evidence they expect to see.
Escalation cover
Short-notice specialist input when something has gone wrong and the team needs someone who has seen this failure mode before.
Why this exists.
Most consultancies are not set up to sell you a small amount of help. The minimum viable engagement is a statement of work, a discovery phase, and a number with too many digits in it — so the decision gets made without the advice.
Micro-consulting is the low-commitment entry point. If it turns into something larger, it does so because the work justified it, not because the contract required it.
- Scoped and agreed before anything starts.
- Delivered by the person you spoke to, not passed to a junior.
- Ends with a written output you own.
- No obligation to continue, and no notice period to leave.
Where this experience comes from.
Short engagements are only worth buying if the person turning up has already done the long ones. This is backed by 25+ years of delivery across government, healthcare, MSP, and regulated enterprise environments, including a six-year lead architecture engagement on a nationally significant public-sector programme.
Most of this work sits under non-disclosure agreements, so engagements are described by shape, sector, and scale rather than by client name. How we work explains what can be shared and how.
Start small and see.
Tell us the decision you are trying to make. If a short session is the right answer we will scope one; if it is not, we will say so.
If you need more than a short engagement.
For programme-length or fractional technical authority, see Interim & Fractional Lead Architect. If you are an MSP, agency, or Microsoft Partner looking for delivery capability under your own brand, see Associate & White-Label Delivery.