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Digital Strategy
Most of the money wasted on digital work is spent building the wrong thing competently. Strategy is how we avoid that.
01Why it matters
We are usually brought in when an organisation knows something needs to change but cannot agree on what. There is a backlog nobody believes in, a platform everybody complains about, and three teams with three different accounts of the problem. The instinct is to start building. The useful thing to do first is to establish what is actually true.
A strategy engagement produces a decision, not a document. We work through the commercial constraints, the existing technology, the people who have to operate it, and the customers who have to live with it, and we come back with a sequence of moves — what to do first, what it will cost you to do it, and what you are choosing not to do as a result.
We say no to work at this stage more often than at any other. If the answer is that you should fix your operating model rather than your website, we will tell you that, and it will be cheaper than finding out in month nine of a build.
02What we do
The work inside the engagement.
- 01
Discovery
Structured interviews with the people who use and operate the current system, alongside a read of the analytics, the support queue and the roadmap that never gets delivered.
- 02
Opportunity mapping
Where value is being lost today, sized honestly, and traceable back to evidence rather than to a workshop sticky note.
- 03
Service and platform definition
What the thing is, who it serves, what it must do at launch, and what it must be able to become without a rewrite.
- 04
Sequencing and investment case
A phased plan with the reasoning attached, written so it survives contact with a finance committee.
03A typical engagement
A partner and a strategist, working alongside two or three people from your side who have the authority to make decisions. Weekly sessions, no steering committee theatre.
- Typical duration
- Six to ten weeks
- What you receive
- Findings from discovery, with the evidence behind them
- A defined service or platform proposition
- A sequenced delivery plan with cost and risk attached
- An investment case written for the people who approve it
04Proof
All workWhere this work has been done.
Halden Maritime
Replacing forty spreadsheets with one operations platform
A port services operator running its entire scheduling function on shared spreadsheets, rebuilt as a single system its planners actually wanted to use.
Read the case study
Brightmoor Trust
A grant application that does not punish small organisations
A funder whose application process was quietly selecting for applicants with professional bid writers, redesigned around the organisations it was meant to reach.
Read the case studyNext step
Tell us what is not working. We will tell you what we think.
A first conversation is an hour, costs nothing, and usually ends with a straight answer about whether we are the right studio for the problem.