A documented plan before you commit to building anything.
A fixed-scope engagement that turns an unclear architecture, vendor choice, or production risk into a current-state review, a risk register, and a prioritized plan — documents you keep, whatever you decide to do next.
Most engagements start here, not with a build.
Committing engineering time before the architecture, vendor, and risk decisions are settled is how teams end up rebuilding six months in. The assessment exists to make those decisions first, on paper, before anyone writes code against them.
It's scoped narrowly on purpose: understand what exists, name the risks precisely, and hand you a plan you could execute with us or without us.
Seven areas, reviewed together.
These map to the eight engineering pillars, scoped to what's relevant for your system.
Architecture
Current system design, component boundaries, data flows, and single points of failure.
Platform
Shared infrastructure, tooling, and whether teams are rebuilding the same AI plumbing independently.
Reliability
What's evaluated today, what isn't, and how you'd know if quality degraded after a change.
Security
Identity, authorization, tenant isolation, and secrets handling across models, agents, and tools.
Operations
Observability, monitoring, incident response, and what happens at 2am when something breaks.
Data
Knowledge architecture, retrieval quality, freshness, and how context boundaries are enforced.
Governance
What's running in production, who approved it, and how policy gets enforced instead of just documented.
What you get.
Documents, not a slide deck. Every item below is something you keep and can act on independently.
How it runs.
4–6 weeks, five stages.
What happens after the readout.
The roadmap points to one of four next steps, depending on what it finds.
Architecture Sprint outcome only
Some teams stop here: the documented plan is enough to align internal stakeholders or brief an internal team.
Build Project
Fixed scope with change control, for one production outcome the assessment identified as highest priority.
Platform Build
A larger engagement when the assessment surfaces a platform-level gap affecting multiple teams.
Managed Engineering
Ongoing support once a system from the roadmap is live: monitoring, updates, and cost optimization.
Not sure you need a full assessment yet?
Run the nine-question production readiness check first. If most of it comes up short, the assessment is the next step. If only one or two dimensions are weak, that might be a narrower conversation.
Common questions.
Start with a plan, not a build.
30 minutes to walk through what you're working with. We'll tell you honestly whether an assessment is the right next step, or whether you can skip straight to build.