Practical help for CIOs and IT leaders
Engage an external practitioner who can run targeted audits, take time‑boxed expert tasks off your plate, reinforce projects on the ground and help evaluate or recruit teams. Scope varies with your needs; exit is clean.
Delivering targeted external audits
When you need focused audits without spinning up a big programme — we run scoped assessments and report to leadership.
- User satisfaction & UX — interviews/surveys, pain‑points, friction against BAU, adoption blockers.
- Estate health — identity (AD/Entra), M365 baseline, backups/DR, network posture (LAN/VLAN/WAN/Wi‑Fi), cloud/on‑prem workloads.
- Team & suppliers quality — RACI clarity, skill coverage, process hygiene, MSP fit.
- Output: short exec read‑out + prioritised actions (risk/impact/effort/cost), optionally presented to a steering committee.
Where a wider baseline across users, estate health and controls is necessary, refer to the Independent IT Audit.
Ad‑hoc expertise (time‑boxed, outcome‑based)
When the team is busy or a topic sits outside their scope — we do specific tasks and finish them.
- Documentation reviews — runbooks, recovery steps, standards; fix gaps, keep what’s useful.
- Training / webinars — Entra/M365 baseline, Azure governance/FinOps light, backup/DR testing, network/service over IP hygiene.
- Architecture peer‑reviews — options, trade‑offs, constraints; cut through noise and converge.
- Policy baselines — patching cadence, access tiers, device posture, backup frequency; right‑sized, not theoretical.
Format: 0.5–5 days, clear deliverables. No long consultancy cadence unless you ask for it. Where sustained governance and regular KPI reporting are required, consider Delegated IT leadership
Project reinforcement (hands‑on, not necessarily leading)
Short bursts where you need a competent extra pair of hands alongside internal staff — on site if required.
- Moves & lift‑and‑shift — rack/stack with your engineer, cabling sanity, cutover/fallback.
- Migrations — M365/Azure, identity, workloads; reversible plans, RAID log, sensible change windows, migrations without hardware sales
- Supplier coordination — ISP/MSP/hosts/print/UC; keep people focused on the same acceptance criteria.
- Documentation — optional; if you prefer to keep this internal, fine. We focus on execution quality.
Role is supportive or lead, as you prefer. Not a generic interim; a practitioner who won’t slow your engineers down.
IT team evaluation & recruitment support
Help for leaders building or reshaping the function.
- Skills matrix & role profiles; pragmatic JD drafts.
- Interview packs & practical exercises (right‑sized for your stack).
- Interim coverage until hiring is complete; clean hand‑over when the team is ready.
- Onboarding paths for BAU, change and incident flows.
Engagement model (fit‑for‑purpose)
- Remote UK/EU — on‑site when hands‑on adds value.
- Scope, cadence and deliverables adapted to your need (ad‑hoc or short bursts).
- NDA, scoped read‑only access, exit‑friendly by design (we document or we keep it internal if you prefer).
- Pricing: SoW/time‑boxed; project reinforcement by milestones; recruitment support per exercise/interview day.
For CIOs and IT leaders: see the Enterprise Capabilities articles covering targeted audits, ad‑hoc expertise, project reinforcement and team evaluation.
If you’d like to discuss your specific needs or explore how we can work together, simply get in touch.
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