briefings
The Wrong Comparison
Two questions arrive early, usually unspoken until the second call: what does this cost, and why not just call one of the big firms.
Both assume the same frame, that this is a purchase to be compared against other purchases in the same category. It isn’t, and the mismatch is the answer to both.
A large advisory or systems-integration firm sells delivery: people, hours, a statement of work, a team that scales with the programme. That is a real category, and a necessary one, and it is not what closes the gap this site describes. A delivery team executes inside the operating model you already have. It has no commercial reason to tell you the operating model is why delivery keeps stalling. The bigger the firm, the more its revenue depends on the current structure staying exactly complex enough to need managing.
Independent counsel is a different category: judgment, not headcount, bought precisely because it has no reason to prefer the current structure over a simpler one. There is no scope to expand and no bench to keep utilised. That makes it harder to price against a day rate, because it was never sold by the day.
The more useful comparison is not this fee against another firm’s fee. It is this fee against what the current pattern is already costing: the third pilot stalling where the first two did, the programme that clears every review and never reaches production, the decision that keeps travelling for a quarter because no one owns it. None of that appears as a single line on a status report, which is exactly why it survives budget scrutiny while a priced, visible engagement does not.
The question worth asking first is not what this costs. It is what continuing to solve a structural problem with delivery capacity has already cost, and whether another cycle of it is the plan.