How we help scoping a project
Most of what you pay is decided before anyone is hired
A brief that names the decision, the boundary and what your own team already covers can be answered by one person in three weeks. The same problem written loosely gets priced as a project. This page sets out the questions we work through with you, and what the conversation costs.
Why it decides the bill
A loose brief is priced for the widest reading of it
Nobody quotes on a problem. They quote on the description of a problem, and the looser that description is, the more of it a seller has to cover. Two teams facing the same question can pay very different amounts for it, and the gap opens in the week before anyone is hired.
Traditional firms scope too, and the good ones are better at it than most buyers. What sits behind their version is that the same conversation sizes their own engagement. Asking a seller to draw your boundary is asking them to argue against their own quarter.
We do the scoping first and propose people after. When the brief turns out to need one person for three weeks, that is what the shortlist says.
What we work through
Nine questions a brief has to answer before anyone is hired.
- 01The decision the work has to serve
Start with what changes once the work is done. “We want a view on the German market” names a topic. “We decide in March whether to open there, and on what evidence” names a decision, and it tells us who to look for and where the work stops.
Some engagements serve a decision somebody else makes. If a board, a lender or a regulator is the real audience, say so now. It changes who you need in the room.
- 02What you want back
Name the thing you are holding at the end. A recommendation you can take to the board, a plan your own team can run, a model you keep using after the consultant leaves, a process that works on a Monday morning, or a seat filled for six months.
Advisory work ends in a document. Execution work ends in something running, and technology or AI work ends in a system your people operate. A document has a delivery date. The other two have a handover.
- 03The boundary
Say what falls outside. Which markets, which business units, which time horizon, and how deep the analysis goes before it stops. Write down the questions you are choosing not to ask, because those are the ones that come back as a change request in week five.
A brief without a boundary gets priced for the widest reading of it. You pay for that reading whether or not you wanted it.
- 04What your own team already covers
List what you have in-house: the data, the analysis, the project management, the relationships that open a door. Everything you can cover yourself comes off the brief.
This step shrinks a brief more than any other, and it is the one you are most likely to skip, because it is work before the work.
- 05Who the work answers to
For anything that runs inside your organisation, say who the person reports to, what they can decide on their own, and who has to be in the room when they cannot. An interim lead without a mandate spends the first month discovering they do not have one, and you pay for that month.
For advisory work the same question is smaller but still worth answering: who reads the draft, and who signs off on the final.
- 06The number and the date
Set the budget against what the decision is worth. A pricing question that moves a few points of margin carries a different budget than a reorganisation, and neither of them is a day rate multiplied by a guess.
Then put a date on it and say what happens if the answer arrives later. A deadline with a consequence behind it rules formats in and out on its own.
- 07How you will know it worked
Pick a number you already track: days to close the month, hours per case, margin on one product line. We record where it stands at kick-off, and each check-in measures against it. For advisory work the number sits one step further on: the decision gets made on time, on the evidence you asked for.
Agree the first stop now as well. A small slice of the work can prove itself in two to four weeks. Write down what that slice has to show before you continue, and what makes you stop. Stopping in week four costs you a month; drifting to month six costs you six.
- 08The pace, and when you take over
Say how many days a week your organisation can absorb. A consultant booked five days a week waits on decisions your team takes at the speed of two, and you pay for the waiting.
Then plan the step-down. Name the person on your side who owns the result, the week they take over, and how the consultant's days drop as they do. We plan every engagement to finish with fewer people on it than it started with.
- 09The format that fits what is left
By this point the brief tends to name its own shape. We propose the one that returns most on this problem and tell you why we picked it:
- One specialist for a defined piece of work
- A compact team of independents
- A boutique firm under one roof
- A senior advisor by the hour
You can overrule us. Pick a format before the eight questions above have answers, though, and you have nothing to match it to.
How the conversation runs
Send us a few paragraphs on what is happening and what you want to change. Rough is fine. You can run that through our AI intake first, which comes back with a first cut at the scope, so the conversation starts from something written down instead of from a blank hour.
The Legate team then works through the nine questions with you. One conversation, and you leave with a brief you can act on. In many cases it is a smaller brief than the one you came in with, because steps three and four take work out of it.
Our fee attaches to an engagement. A conversation that ends with you deciding your own team can handle this costs you nothing, and we would rather reach that conclusion in an hour than three weeks into a project.
From there the brief goes to matching, and a vetted shortlist reaches you within two business days with the reasoning per candidate and the full price per option.
Questions
Frequently asked
Turning what you want into something a consultant can be measured against: the decision, the output, the boundary, what your team covers, who the work answers to, the budget and the date, the number that shows it worked, and the pace with its handover. We do it with you before we propose anyone, because a brief that is still vague gets matched against a vague idea of who fits it.
A few paragraphs. What is happening, what you want to change, and roughly when. Anything more precise than that is usually a guess you will revise in the conversation, and the conversation is where the precision is supposed to come from.
Work back from the decision rather than forward from a rate. Put a figure on what the decision is worth or what it costs you to get it wrong, and use that as the ceiling. We then tell you which formats fit under it, and we say so when the honest answer is that nothing does.
No. Our fee attaches to an engagement, so if the conversation ends without one, you owe nothing.
All of it. Interim leadership, programme and project management, finance and operations work, change, due-diligence support, system choices and AI implementation come through the same conversation. Execution briefs take longer on two of the questions: what you are holding at the end, and who the work answers to. A strategy brief can leave the reporting line implicit. An interim lead cannot.
The Legate team runs the kick-off and checks in at agreed points, and that is where a change gets raised. We rewrite the statement of work rather than letting the engagement drift, and you see what the change does to the price before it happens.
