Strategic IT Consultants

Project work that doesn’t fit inside a managed-services contract. Typical engagements: vendor selection (RFP support, shortlist evaluation, contract review), M&A IT due diligence (target-environment assessment, risk register, day-one and day-100 integration plan), architecture reviews (cloud landing zones, identity, networking, security posture), and compliance roadmaps (Essential Eight, ISO 27001, APRA CPS 234, SOC 2 readiness — gap analysis and remediation plan, not the audit itself). We also do vCIO engagements where a business wants senior IT leadership without hiring a full-time CIO.

No. We take standalone consulting engagements regularly, and for many clients that’s how the relationship starts — a discrete piece of advisory work, with no expectation that it leads anywhere else. If it makes sense to move into managed services afterwards, that’s a separate conversation with a separate scope. If it doesn’t, the consulting engagement ends cleanly with a deliverable you own. We don’t bundle consulting fees into a back-door sales process for the managed-services contract.

Written recommendations, risk-rated, with the reasoning behind each one, not a slide deck. A typical engagement produces a report covering the current-state assessment, the findings (each tagged by severity and effort), a prioritised remediation plan with rough cost ranges, and the decisions we’d recommend the executive team take. Where the engagement is a vendor selection, the deliverable is a scored shortlist against your weighted criteria, with a recommended supplier and the trade-offs documented. The point that matters: we don’t sell our own products inside the recommendation. If the right answer is a tool we don’t resell or a path we don’t deliver, the report says so. Advice from a consultancy that earns margin on the recommended outcome is structurally compromised, and we’ve designed the practice to avoid that.

Fixed-scope project pricing, scoped per engagement. We don’t sell consulting on a time-and-materials drip. Every engagement starts with a one-page scoping conversation, followed by a written statement of work covering the questions we’re answering, the artefacts we’ll produce, the people we’ll need access to, and the fixed price for the work. If scope changes mid-engagement, we re-quote the change rather than running a meter. Why fixed-price: it puts the planning risk on us, not on you.