The situation
You are accountable for an estate you did not build and cannot yet describe.
People arrive here two ways, and it is nearly always one of them.
You were hired into it. The operational problems reach you before the explanation does, and the people who can explain it have their own view of what matters.
A date is coming. A lease ends. A facility closes. A contract expires. Nobody has a plan that survives being read carefully.
Either way the next decisions are expensive and hard to reverse, and you are expected to make them without appearing not to know. That is the job this exists for.
Start here
Six stones, ninety seconds, and you will know whether this is for you.
- Nobody is on trial. Your people contributed to a plan. They did not defend a record.
- Most of it will not exist. Saying so takes seconds and is a finding, not a failure.
- Evidence is graded, never guessed. Described and demonstrated are different claims and are shown as different claims.
- Two readers, not one. A second model checks how the first read your people. Where they differ, you are told.
- You get the position and the plan. Where you stand, and the work streams that move it, in order, with what proves each one done.
- And the record itself. Organised, gaps visible, yours to keep. Most clients did not have one.
What it is not
Not an audit, and the difference is structural rather than a matter of manners.
An audit asks people to account for the past, and people asked to account for the past give the defensible answer. That answer is accurate and nearly useless — it omits the constraint nobody wrote down, the practice that survives a bad week, and the thing they would change if it were up to them.
Everything here is pointed forward. A gap is what to do next. A vague answer was probably the wrong question. Somebody who sounded defensive means the session failed, not the person.
That is not politeness. It is the only way to get the answer worth having.
What you leave with
Three things, and the third is the one nobody expects to value most.
- Where you actually stand. Fifteen capabilities scored nought to four, each with the evidence behind it and the confidence in that evidence held separately. Nothing observed is never reported as a zero.
- What to do, in what order. Eighty-eight work streams across the fifteen. Thirty-six of them pay whether or not you ever move a workload, and each says what observably shows it is finished.
- Your own operating record, organised. The artefacts an operating discipline should hold, with the holes visible. Clients without a configuration record leave with the beginnings of one.
You may contract the migration. You cannot contract being the operator afterwards — and of those eighty-eight work streams, five can be handed to somebody who then leaves.
How it runs
A subscription, not a project. It ends when you say it does.
No term, no expiry, nothing to renegotiate. Most of the work is your own people answering questions inside your own boundary — we never hold your documents, only what the answers established.
Every week you get a status note whether or not anything is wrong, showing what is with you and what is with us. When you decide it is finished, the package is produced in whatever state it is in. Stop in month two and you get a smaller honest thing. You never get nothing.
Why a cairn
Because it shows you the way without grading you for needing it.
A cairn is a stack of stones on a hillside, put there by people who went first, for whoever comes after. Nobody signs them. They are not a monument to the person who placed the last stone — they are a marker that the route goes this way and that somebody made it.
That is the whole intent. You are not the first organisation to inherit an estate nobody documented, facing a date somebody else set. The markers are what others left.