Technology consulting: someone to own the call, argue it, or scope it
Technology consulting is bringing in senior technical judgement from outside your company, and the three services here differ by one thing: who owns the decision once the advice is in.
01Work
Four decisions that are expensive to get wrong once
Four kinds of decision with one property in common: the bill for getting one wrong arrives years after the meeting that settled it, and by then it is somebody else's budget.
Build, buy, or leave it alone
Nobody with a product in the answer can price the option of not buying it, which is why this one is worth a second read from outside the sale. That read puts the option nobody costed back on the table: a smaller version, a later version, or nothing.
Whether the platform can carry the plan
The architecture you run today, read against the next three years of roadmap. The expensive version of this question is the one answered mid-build, by the team already writing against the constraint nobody checked for.
Whether the team is the right shape
Structure, seniority mix, and where the single points of failure are. It is the uncomfortable one, and the one with the most leverage in it, because a good team recovers from a bad architecture more readily than the reverse.
What the idea actually costs
Turning something everyone agrees about into a scope an engineer can quote against. This is business analysis, and it is the cheapest insurance available against meeting the real requirement halfway through the build. On a European manufacturer's e-commerce programme the analysis is what determined the development phase.
02Services
Three services, and what happens after the recommendation
One row per service page, and they differ in one place only: what happens once somebody has said what should be done. In the first, we own the decisions that follow. In the second, your team does. In the third, the direction is already settled and what is missing is the scope.
| Service | What you are actually buying |
|---|---|
| CTO as a service | Nobody owns itSomeone in the seat for technology direction and delivery: the calls, the teams and vendors, the architecture, and the answer when a date is at risk. Fractional or interim rather than a hire, and the seat decides rather than advises.CTO as a serviceOr book a meeting |
| Technology advisory | You will executeThe options weighed, the other side of each one argued, and a written plan handed back. It stops at the roadmap: your own team carries it out, and we support the implementation afterwards only if you want it. The smaller of the two senior purchases, and the sufficient one wherever your side will do the executing.Technology advisoryOr book a meeting |
| Business analysis | The scope is fuzzyA wish list turned into requirements engineers can build against, with the exclusions written down. That last part is what makes the estimate underneath it mean anything, and it is what turns an idea everyone agrees about into something a team can quote against.Business analysisOr book a meeting |
03Fit
Three of these six end with us not selling you anything
Advice is the easiest thing on this page to oversell, because there is always more of it available to buy. So the table starts from your situation instead of our catalogue, and the count in the heading is one you can check by reading down it. A UK founder described the same habit in his Clutch review: "They gave value-added feedback when they thought I was asking for something that was not necessarily the best solution."
| Your situation | What we recommend instead |
|---|---|
| A capable engineering lead who already knows the answer | Back themWhere your lead has a clear recommendation and the record to back it, a consultant mostly buys you a second opinion to weigh against your own expert's. Buying one to overrule an internal expert is a governance problem, and governance problems do not have technology solutions. |
| You want a document to justify a decision already taken | We would declineYou would get the honest read, and it may not be the one that was wanted. Where the outcome is fixed in advance, the same money buys more as build time than as a report nobody is allowed to disagree with. |
| A specific technical question with a checkable answer | Buy the narrow thingIs the test suite any good, is the cloud bill defensible, is this codebase maintainable. Each of those is a quality audit or a cloud review: more conclusive than an advisory engagement, because the answer is a measurement rather than a judgement. |
| Everyone agrees on the idea and nobody can cost it | Business analysisBuy this before you buy an opinion. A costed, buildable scope with the exclusions written down is what every estimate after it rests on, including the ones you take to other firms. |
| Technology decisions are being made by whoever is free | Put someone in the seatCTO as a service, fractionally. The cost of an unowned technology function is not the decisions that get made badly; it is the ones that quietly do not get made at all. Where the decisions piling up are specifically about AI, about which models and which evaluations, that is the chief AI officer seat instead, in a different category. |
| A permanent CTO is affordable and the role is full-time | Hire oneFractional leadership suits a company that needs direction before it needs a department. If the role is genuinely full-time and you can fund it, hire it. |
Who gives the advice
The advice comes from inside a company of 100+ senior in-house engineers across six countries. unicrew has delivered 120+ projects across 12 countries since 2012. unicrew has PMP-certified project managers and ISTQB-certified QA engineers, and our business analysts hold certifications including CBAP (Certified Business Analysis Professional), AAC (Agile Analysis Certification) and PMP (Project Management Professional). Engagements run under ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015, renewed through a multi-stage audit with Quay Audit UK. There is no minimum engagement period, and most engagements start within two to four weeks.
04First
Four steps, and the second one changes the question
Four steps, in this order, on the way to a recommendation. The second is where the value concentrates: the question in the brief and the decision in front of you are not always the same thing, and the rest of the work is spent on the wrong problem until that gap is closed.
- Read the system and talk to the people running itArchitecture, dependencies, deployment, and the engineers who know where it hurts. The second half is where the real constraints are: they are seldom written down and somebody always knows them. From you: read access, and an hour each with two or three people who work inside the system.You getA read of the system as it is
- Write down the decision actually in front of youThe brief names a question and the work starts by checking it is the right one. Where a stack choice is really a delivery problem, choosing the stack settles nothing and buys a year of arguing about the wrong thing. From you: the brief, and a straight answer on what happens if the decision is simply deferred.You getThe restated question
- Cost the two or three real options, including doing nothingDoing nothing is an option with a price and it belongs in the comparison, next to the cheap version nobody proposed because it is unexciting. From you: which constraints are real, in budget, dates and people, and which are preferences that have been repeated until they sound like constraints.You getCosted options, with a recommendation
- Say which one we would pick, and why we might be wrongA recommendation with no stated uncertainty is a sales document. The conditions under which we would change our mind are part of the deliverable, so you can watch for them and act before the plan quietly stops being true. From you: one person who can take the decision once it is written down.You getA recommendation, and its assumptions
When a company asks us which database, or which framework, the honest first move is to stop answering the question. In my experience the team that cannot ship is not usually blocked by the technology they named. It is the most legible thing to point at, and it is checkable, which is exactly why it gets blamed. Ask what shipped in the last quarter and why it took as long as it did, and the real answer turns up in about an hour.
Oleksandr TrofimovChief Technology Officer, unicrew05Proof
Three programmes, and who owned which decisions
LogisticsApp Store for warehouse managementOur client Bitergo offers a collection of business apps to optimize warehouse management, scalable from start-ups to 4PL companies. Given the business drivers, the client decided to upgrade the front-end of all their applications to the latest version of Angular.Rapid increaseOf test accounts ordered by potential customers after the site launched
eCommerceEcommerce software development for JewelCandleJewelCandle, a mid-size European manufacturer of scented products, sells across seven EU countries (B2B and B2C) via online shops.10,000-plusProducts manufactured
AutomotiveJack Cooper: Software for automotiveA sophisticated vehicle inspection tool for one of the biggest transportation providers.
06Questions
What buyers ask before choosing one of the three
Senior technical judgement bought from outside the company, for a decision the people you have cannot settle on their own. Here it is three purchases. CTO as a service puts someone in the seat who makes the calls, runs teams or vendors, and answers for delivery. Technology advisory weighs the options, argues the other side, and hands back a plan your team executes. Business analysis turns an agreed idea into a scope engineers can build against. Which one you need is decided by who owns the decision afterwards. A cloud-services CEO put the trigger for buying any of them as an internal team that "sometimes requires additional assistance in various areas, including project planning and overcoming technical obstacles" (Clutch).
Then we say so, and four of the six rows in the table above route somewhere other than the three services on this page. If a capable lead already has the answer, back them: a consultant then buys a second opinion to weigh against your own expert's, which is a governance question rather than a technical one. If the question is narrow and checkable, a quality audit or a cloud review is more conclusive than an advisory engagement. If the role is genuinely full-time and you can fund it, hire a permanent CTO.
No rate, and no band. A fractional seat and a second opinion are not the same purchase, so a headline figure would be wrong for almost everyone reading it. What is fixed in advance is how you are billed: three engagement models, time and materials (billed hourly, quoted per project), fixed price (outcome based, quoted per project), and team extension (billed monthly per team member). There is no minimum engagement period. What moves the number is how many systems and how many stakeholders are in scope, which is what the first conversation is for.
Sometimes, and it is better said here than left for you to notice. We sell the building as well as the advice, so a recommendation to build comes from a firm that could be paid to do it. What you can check against this page: three of the six rows in the table above end with no engagement at all, and a fourth points at a smaller purchase than the one you came for. A Belgian digital agency's managing partner puts what comes back from us as "solutions backed up with the right research and analysis" (Clutch).
Most engagements start within two to four weeks. The work runs around the system and the people you already have: we read the architecture you run rather than proposing a replacement for it, and the main thing we need from you is read access plus time with the engineers who operate it. Where a CTO seat is what you bought, your existing team and vendors keep running and the seat directs them instead of replacing them. How long the work then runs follows how many systems and stakeholders are in scope, which is settled with you before it starts rather than quoted from a standard length.
What teams usually pair this with
All servicesDescribe the decision in front of you
One paragraph about the choice you are trying to make is enough. You get a senior engineer's read on which of the three it needs, or an honest answer that it needs none of them. We reply to enquiries within 1 business day.