How we work
Delivery in practice
Rather than describe outcomes we cannot attribute, this page sets out the mechanics: what happens in each week of a ramp, who does what, and where engagements typically go wrong.
A twelve-engineer, three-country ramp
Representative timeline under our standard process, assuming no visa requirement and standard screening.
Brief and shortlist
Role definitions, seniority, locations and overlap hours agreed in writing. Bench searched and profiles shared within 48 hours.
Client interviews
You interview every engineer. Declines are replaced from the same shortlist within one business day.
Contracting and clearance
Local employment or assignment, background screening and access requests run in parallel rather than in sequence.
Onboarding
Engineers join your tooling, repositories and ceremonies. A delivery lead is named as the single escalation point.
Steady state
Weekly reporting established. Formal review at week four covering fit, output and anything to correct.
Governance
Who is accountable for what
- Delivery lead
- Named on every engagement of four or more people, included at no additional cost. Owns reporting, escalation, team continuity and the relationship. Reachable directly, not through an inbox.
- Engineers
- Accountable to your technical leads for the work itself. Attend your ceremonies, follow your review standards, and post written status daily.
- Account director
- Commercial owner. Handles contract changes, capacity planning and the monthly service review. Not involved in day-to-day delivery.
- Your leads
- Set priorities, allocate work and accept output. For augmentation engagements this is the critical dependency, and we say so before starting.
- Escalation
- Delivery lead, then account director, then a director of the company. Each step has a named person and a response commitment.
Honest assessment
Where engagements go wrong
Five failure modes account for most difficult engagements in this industry. Each has a specific counter-measure in how we work.
The client has no capacity to direct the engineers
Staff augmentation assumes someone on your side allocates work and reviews output. Where that person is already overloaded, engineers become expensive and idle. Counter-measure: we ask who this person is during scoping, and recommend a dedicated team with its own lead if the answer is unconvincing.
Access is not ready when the engineer starts
The most common cause of a wasted first fortnight. Laptops, VPN, repository and environment access frequently take longer than the hiring did. Counter-measure: access is raised as a tracked work package at contract stage with named owners on both sides, and we will delay a start date rather than bill for waiting.
Scope was agreed verbally
Fixed-price work with an informal specification produces disagreement about what was included. Counter-measure: we do not accept fixed-price work without written acceptance criteria, even when the client would prefer to move faster.
Seniority was over-stated to win the work
The engineer cannot operate at the level assumed, and review burden rises rather than falls. Counter-measure: a client interview on every placement and a published seniority definition, plus a willingness to report that a skill is thin this month.
Knowledge leaves with the engineer
Six months of context held in one person's head, and a roll-off that sets the team back. Counter-measure: documentation and runbooks are produced during the engagement, and handover is a contractual obligation before the final invoice.
A note on evidence
Why there are no case studies on this site
Named references and client logos are frequently published without the client's active consent, and anonymised success stories cannot be verified by the reader in any case. We would rather set out the mechanics of how we work, publish our commitments contractually, and let you test them on a single role with a one-week replacement guarantee attached. References are available privately, with client consent, at the appropriate stage of a procurement conversation.
Test the process rather than the pitch.
One engineer, one real piece of work, one week of replacement cover. That is a reasonable way to evaluate any supplier.