One journey, not a shopping list.
Evidence first. Opinions are cheap. Every engagement starts with a fixed-fee Workforce Diagnostic and follows the same road: Diagnose, Design, Build, Embed, and the Insights & Signals that keep flowing afterwards.
You can enter at any stage. We will always show you the whole road first.
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Fixed fee · three to four weeks
Diagnose: the Workforce Diagnostic
We map your workforce model, your culture and communications, your people processes, your systems and your data flows: what actually happens, not what the org chart claims.
What you get: a plain-English report. Where the money leaks (agency spend, attrition, workarounds), where the data lives and doesn't join, and a costed, sequenced plan. Yours to keep whether or not you go further with us.
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Weeks, not months
Design: the target state
Working with your leadership team, we design the target state: the workforce model (permanent and contingent mix, hard-to-fill strategy, retention economics), the culture, communications and development plan that makes it stick, the systems architecture around it, and the measures that will tell you it's working.
What you get: a design your own people helped shape, with the trade-offs stated and the sequence agreed.
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Alongside your team
Build: we build the joins
A data warehouse across your source systems (MIS, HR, payroll, finance) with a dashboard layer bespoke to your institution, plus the HR and people-system changes designed in stage two.
What you get: working infrastructure, not a specification. Your team works alongside ours so capability transfers as we go.
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The software stays
Embed: then the tools are yours
Dashboards, people systems and recruitment tooling we've already built and tested become yours to run, with support as light or as involved as you want.
What you get: working tools in your ownership, your team running them, and a handover with a date rather than a fade-out.
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Ongoing · through the portal
Insights & Signals: the numbers keep working
Once the tools are yours, the data keeps flowing. Live sector benchmarks, pay and hiring signals, and alerts when your own numbers drift from the plan you set in Design.
What you get: a standing view of your market and your institution through the portal and quarterly reviews, with honest advice when a signal needs acting on. Not a meter running.
The uncomfortable version of the finding is the only useful one.
We say no
Wrong problem, wrong timing, or a mandate that does not exist internally: better to say so at the start than bill through it. If the Diagnostic says you don't need us for the next bit, that's what it says.
No pyramid
The people who scope the work do the work. You are not funding a bench or a graduate learning your institution at your expense.
Priced on scope
Fixed fees against defined outcomes wherever the work can be specified. Day rates create an incentive we would rather not have.
Findings go to the board unedited
We will help you frame a difficult message. We will not soften it into something that no longer requires a decision.
Tooling in your ownership
Anything we build is in your tenancy, your repository, your licence. No black boxes and no exit fee.
Your data stays yours
Minimum necessary access, held only as long as the engagement needs it, and never used to train anything. Set out in the privacy notice.
Enter anywhere.
A college that just needs dashboards can start at Build. A trust mid-merger might start at Design. But we'll always show you the whole road first: that's what the Diagnostic is for.