Drawings spread on a trestle table on an unfinished floor, a lamp over them and tower cranes lit outside.

Consultancy

A design examined before it becomes expensive.

What we are hired for

Five calls we get.

“The audit wants ninety days. We have thirty.”

A pharmaceutical facility. Everything installed and working, then an audit asked for ninety days of retention and the recorder holds thirty.

The obvious answer is more storage. We asked three questions before that one.

Where are these cameras, and what applies to them? Some positions fall under compliance requirements that set the retention period for you. Others fall under DPDP, where footage of people is personal data and retention is a decision you have to be able to defend. Nobody had asked which was which, so the ninety-day figure had arrived from an auditor rather than from the requirement.

What make are these, and where does the footage actually go? The recorder is on site. That does not tell you where the data is. Some systems mirror to a manufacturer’s cloud by default, and unless somebody has documented the data path, the honest answer is that nobody in the building knows who else can reach it. That is a bigger finding than the retention gap and it was not what anybody called about.

And does each position need the camera that is on it? A six-megapixel camera on a corridor that two megapixels covers properly is inflating your storage bill three times over and adding nothing to what you can see.

Storage was the fourth question, and by then it was much smaller.

None of this shows up on a screen. The system looked healthy, the contract was current, and the first anybody heard was an auditor asking a question nobody had prepared for. That is how it arrives: not as a failure, but as a request you cannot answer.

“We have three quotes and no way to compare them.”

They arrive at different numbers because they are for different systems, and the differences are in line items nobody outside the trade reads. Whether the BoQ you floated was right in the first place is a question nobody has asked at all.

“The vendor’s design is free. Is it any good?”

It looks complete, it costs nothing, and it was written by somebody who will be paid to build it. That is not dishonest: it is simply not a review.

“A handover that has to be defensible two years later.”

Documentation, cause and effect, and test records that survive the people who witnessed them.

“It works, but we cannot evidence it.”

Live views on a screen and nothing retrievable when somebody official asks for a specific ten minutes.

Every one of these looks like a purchasing question and none of them is. More storage, a cheaper quote, a bigger camera. Those are answers to questions nobody has checked.

The work is finding out what the question actually is, before anybody spends anything. That is what consultancy is.

We design systems. We also build them.

You should know that before you engage us, and it is the first thing we say rather than the last.

What it means in practice: a design review from us carries no obligation and no approach to your client. If you want the work delivered, we can quote it. If you want the review only, that is a complete engagement and we will say so in writing.

If what you need is an opinion from somebody with nothing to sell you afterwards, that is a different kind of appointment and we will tell you so rather than take the fee.

Deliverables

Six documents, not a conversation.

Design basis report: The strategy, the assumptions and why each decision was made, so the next engineer inherits reasoning rather than equipment.
System design and layouts: Coverage, zoning and device placement, worked against the actual building rather than a typical floor plate.
Cause-and-effect matrix: Every input against every output, written before installation rather than reconstructed after it.
Tender BOQ and scope boundaries: Interfaces named with an owner each, so no interface can be assumed to sit in somebody else’s package.
Test and acceptance regime: What is tested, at what interval, and what constitutes a pass for each interlock.
Commissioning record: Device-level evidence and interlock verification, with results recorded line by line.

How an engagement runs

Four stages, with a decision point at each.

You can stop after any of them, and the work to that point is yours.

Brief and site walkDecision: proceed to design intent, or stop with a written brief.
Design intentDecision: approve the intent, or revise it.
SpecificationDecision: issue for tender, or hold.
Witnessed testingAgainst the protocol written at stage three, with the result recorded per line.

The systems we design across