Assurance

Assurance services

Every troubled programme has a moment when someone senior first suspects the reporting and the reality have parted company. Assurance exists for that moment. We provide independent, evidence-led review – discreetly, quickly, and without an interest in any particular answer.

That last clause is the one to test us on. Assurance from a firm that also wants the recovery contract, the delivery extension, or the software renewal is not assurance; it is business development with a clipboard. We carry none of those interests. Our finding is our only product, which is why our finding can be trusted.

01

Project Healthchecks

When to commission one
When milestones keep moving but the RAG status does not; when the programme's confidence and its evidence have visibly diverged; when a major go/no-go decision approaches and the board wants more than the programme's own assurance of itself; or before those symptoms appear at all – the cheapest healthcheck is the one commissioned early.
What we examine
Not the paperwork's completeness but the programme's truth: whether the plan's load-bearing assumptions hold; whether the architecture will survive the load it is promised; whether the commercial construct and the delivery reality can coexist; whether the reporting chain is carrying information or laundering it; and where the real risk lives – which is rarely where the risk register says it does.
What you receive
A written report in three layers: the answer first, in language a board can act on; the evidence, at the depth your teams need to verify it; and the risk – what would make our finding wrong and what to check before acting on it. Findings are ranked by consequence, not by ease of discovery. Where we recommend intervention, we say what, in what order, and why. Typical duration: two to four weeks. Typical team: two veterans.
The failure this prevents
The programme that consumed two further years of budget because everyone in the reporting chain had reasons to believe the recovery was one quarter away.
02

Technical Audits

When to commission one
At acquisition or investment, when the technology being bought needs examining as rigorously as the accounts; when an estate's cost, risk, or resilience position must be evidenced to a board, a regulator, or an insurer; when a critical supplier's platform claims deserve verification; or after an incident, when “how did this happen” requires an answer that will withstand scrutiny.
What we examine
The estate as it is, not as it is described: architecture and its actual adherence; security posture in practice; scalability and resilience against stated demand; data integrity and lineage; engineering health – the maintainability that determines the estate's real cost of change; and the gap between the documentation and the deployed truth, which is where audits earn their fee.
What you receive
An evidence-led report distinguishing, explicitly, what we verified, what we were told, and what we assumed – because an audit that blurs those categories is worth nothing. Findings are quantified where the evidence permits and labelled as judgement where it does not. For transaction work, we report on the buyer's timetable and in the buyer's language.
The failure this prevents
The acquisition priced on a technology story that six months of ownership disproves.

Discretion

Assurance clients are often managing sensitive situations. We are engaged confidentially, we report only to the commissioning authority, and we conduct fieldwork with the minimum footprint the evidence allows. We are comfortable being the review nobody on the programme was told the full purpose of – and equally comfortable, where you prefer it, working entirely in the open.

Request a confidential review.

Request a confidential review