Advisory review
The project has been running for months. The delivery date has moved twice, the invoices keep arriving and your supplier's answers keep getting vaguer. You want to know whether this still ends well, and what is causing it.
What you need at that point is not a proposal or another methodology, but someone from outside who reads the file, speaks to the people involved and tells you plainly what is going on. Someone with no product to sell that follows from the answer, and therefore free to write 'stop'.
Many second opinions cover a decision you have not taken yet: a quotation, a plan, an environment to be reviewed before you sign. This page is about the moment after that. The money is spent, the work has started, and the question is no longer whether to begin but what the sensible next move is.
Not every project that slips needs a second pair of eyes. These situations do.
A second opinion is not a round of collecting opinions. I work through four lines of enquiry and record, per line, what I see, what I base it on, and how firm it is.
Two things: a report and a conversation. The report first, so you can read it without me in the room. The conversation afterwards, so you can push back on it.
What I hear along the way stays confidential. What I write down belongs to you.
Just as important, because it saves you the wrong conversation.
Many firms offering a second opinion also sell the alternative: a support contract, a migration, an implementation team of their own. That need not be bad faith, but it colours what ends up in the report, and from the outside you cannot tell by how much. Independence here is not a badge; it is a question of how the practice is built.
What this costs depends on the size of the project and on how deep you want me to go. The shape is agreed up front, not afterwards. These are the three shapes I offer.
Reading the documents, three to five conversations, a concise report and a debrief. Enough to establish whether your instinct is right and what is driving it. Meant as a starting point: short enough to decide afterwards whether more is needed.
For a large project, a thick file, or several suppliers involved. We agree a ceiling on hours that I will not exceed without checking with you first, so that time-and-materials is not an open end.
A bounded question, an agreed report, an agreed date, one figure. Works well when the question is sharp ('can this project still make the March delivery date, and why') and less well when it is not yet clear what needs investigating.
I name a rate in the first conversation, together with the shape that fits your question. What follows is a concise proposal with scope, lead time and price: a few pages, not a proposal cycle of weeks.
Four words for work that partly overlaps. The difference in brief, so you know what you are asking for.
The questions you are likely to have before you call, answered here in advance.
An independent judgement on a project already under way: does the schedule still hold, is the scope still the same, is delivery being steered on what is genuinely finished, and which options are left. What sets it apart from many second opinions on the market is the moment: those address a purchase or a plan beforehand, this one a project that has been running for months. In professional vocabulary it is also called a project review or an independent assessment of an IT project; in practice, almost everyone asks for a second opinion.
I reply to a message within one working day. You book a half-hour first conversation yourself in my calendar, where there is room within a few working days. A short review of one to two days is then scheduled in consultation, on a two-week working assumption. There is no multi-week proposal process in between: that is the practical advantage of a practice with no sales organisation. If a steering group meets on a fixed date, say so at the outset and we work back from that day.
Not to your production systems. For the most part, read access to the project documentation is enough: contract, schedule, risk log, progress reports, steering group minutes and the latest delivery documents. If I also need to look at the software delivered, I ask for a test or demo environment and a developer to walk me through it. I do not ask for access to production data unless there is a concrete reason and you want it yourself; in that case we agree in advance what I see and for how long.
Independence means something concrete here: I sell no systems, no licences and no managed services, and hold no partner arrangements with suppliers. So there is no offering of mine that this report could point towards. The practice is one person, so there is no department elsewhere in the building with a stake in the outcome. The honest addition: I also deliver project and recovery work. That is why I keep the review separate from it, disclose any earlier collaboration with a party involved before we start, and, if you ask, name parties that are not me.
Half an hour and a straight account. What was agreed, when it started to slip, what you have already tried and what you actually want to know. You do not need to supply documents yet; that comes once we agree a review will follow. At the end of that conversation I say whether I think a second opinion will help you, or whether something else would serve you better.
That is your decision. The report is meant as the basis for one of three things: a conversation with your supplier that is sharper than the last one, a revised schedule and scope that is actually achievable, or a decision to restart or to stop. I can help with the execution, but that is a new engagement with a new decision behind it and expressly not an automatic next step.
Then that is what it says, with the reasoning attached. Stopping is not a comfortable outcome. But the bill for continuing with a project that is no longer going to work keeps running, and the bill for stopping does not. In that case I also set out what can be salvaged (data, interfaces, knowledge, parts of what was delivered) and what a responsible wind-down requires towards your supplier and your own organisation.
An introductory conversation is without obligation. Sketch what is at stake; I will say honestly whether a second opinion will help you.