How we work with you, from first call to handover
How a problem is framed, how a scope is written, who reviews what and how an engagement ends. The habits are the same in every practice. The scope never is.
How we work
The offering pages say what we do. This page says how we behave inside any of them.
The person who reads your first note is the person who frames the problem, and the same senior person stays through delivery. The reasoning you pay for is never handed down to someone who was not in the room.
The rest of this page follows an engagement in order.
On this page
How does the first conversation go?
A senior practitioner reads what you send and replies in person. The call has a short set of questions, asked in your terms: what changed to make this urgent now, who owns the decision, what has been tried and why it stopped, and who will have to defend the result to someone else afterward. The last question tells us more about the real brief than the others.
We also decide on the call whether to go on. We say so when the problem belongs with a different kind of firm, when the decision is already made and what is wanted is a second signature, or when nobody who can act on the answer is in the conversation.
How is a problem framed?
Problems arrive as solutions: we need an assistant, we need to replace the CRM, we need a dashboard. We restate each one as a failure someone can observe. Who does what, where it goes wrong, who notices, and what it costs the business in time, risk or trust. Then we look for the mechanism, the reason it keeps happening.
That takes conversations at different levels: the executive who owns the outcome, the person who does the work, and the person who inherits what the work produces. We read what they use, such as tickets, contracts, logs and the spreadsheet that quietly runs the process. The diagnosis ends as a page the sponsor signs. If the sponsor cannot recognize their own problem in it, we framed the wrong one and we start the page again.
If the sponsor cannot say in a sentence what finished looks like, we are not ready to write the scope.
What does a written scope pin down?
- The state of the business that counts as done, described so that a third party could check it
- What is included and what is excluded, with a name beside each exclusion for who will deal with it instead
- Who on your side can accept work, who can change the scope, and who decides when they are away
- What we need from you and by when: access, people's time, answers from vendors. A delay on your side is recorded as one
- The artifacts that exist at each checkpoint, and the points at which you can stop
- How a change is raised and agreed before any work on it begins
- What happens to your data and our access when the work ends
Who reviews what, and when?
Review goes to whoever is best placed to catch the error, and nothing we deliver is reviewed only by the person who made it.
| What is reviewed | By whom | What they look for |
|---|---|---|
| The problem statement | The sponsor, and one person who does the work | Whether they recognize it, and what is missing |
| The scope | The sponsor, the owner of the result, and your legal or procurement contact | Exclusions that surprise them and decision rights that are unclear |
| A design decision | A senior practitioner not on the engagement, and your technical owner | What is hard to reverse and what was assumed without evidence |
| Work in progress | Your day-to-day owner, against the test of done | Whether it holds under the conditions of real use |
| Data access | Your security lead | What we can see, for how long, and how access ends |
| The handover | The named owner, in a rehearsal | Whether they can run it with us out of the room |
A pattern we are called into
A scope that changes in the middle
A telecoms operator asks us to stop duplicate customer records created by its CRM sync. The scope covers the sync and the systems it touches.
- Trace. We follow duplicates back to the point where each was created. They begin in a billing import outside the scope.
- Stop. We stop and write up what we found before spending more of the agreed work on the sync.
- Decide. The sponsor can widen the scope, narrow it to the sync, or end the work. The choice goes into the scope as a change, with the reason.
- Continue. The work narrows to the sync. The billing import goes into the handover as a named open item with an owner.
Where it endsA fix that holds, and the evidence to commission the next piece without having to rely on us to explain it.
How does an engagement end?
The last stage is a rehearsal. The named owner runs the work with us watching and the run book open, and we fix whatever they trip on. Alert thresholds are agreed with the people who will be paged, and the decision log is handed over with the reason for each choice.
Our access ends in writing, and you confirm it. A closing review compares what was delivered with the test of done and records what the scope got wrong. Further work from us is a new scope, written the same way, so staying on never happens by default.
What we need from you
What makes the work move is mostly what you provide.
Time with the person who does the work
The manager's account of a process and the operator's account rarely match. We need both.
A sponsor who can settle a question
Someone in the room, or reachable within the working week, with the authority to choose.
The facts that do not flatter
The failed earlier attempt, the system everyone avoids. That is usually where the mechanism is.
An owner named before work starts
A person on your side who will run what we hand over, and who sees it as it is built.
Questions
What do buyers ask about how we work?
Who from XONIK will I deal with?
A senior practitioner reads your first note and stays involved through the work. The written scope names who is responsible for each part, so you always know who to ask and who will make the call when a question is hard.
Can you work alongside our other suppliers?
Yes. The scope names the interface with each supplier and who decides when they disagree. We say in writing if we think a supplier is the cause of the problem.
What happens if you cannot help?
We say so after the first call and, where we can, point to someone better placed. We decline work on judgment about fit, such as a problem that is not ours to solve, and never on the size of the job.
How is our information protected?
NDA terms cover every engagement. We request only the access the work requires, and the scope records which systems and papers we may see. The Trust Center sets out how data, security and AI are handled.
Related
Read the reasoning behind these habits.
Ready to start with the conversation?
Describe what you are weighing in a few lines. A senior practitioner replies with a suggested first conversation.