The graveyard of enterprise technology strategy is full of documents. Beautifully formatted, thoroughly researched, delivered with a presentation and a Q&A — and then never looked at again. The teams we work with are smart; the documents weren’t bad. The problem was structural.
The problem with deliverable-centric engagements
Most strategy engagements end with a deliverable: a report, a roadmap slide deck, a set of recommendations. The consulting team presents it, the client applauds, and then the client goes back to the day job. The document has no forcing function. It doesn’t connect to the next sprint, the next hire, or the next budget conversation.
What we do instead
We structure engagements around decisions, not documents. At kickoff, we ask: what are the three most important technology decisions you need to make in the next six months? Everything we do during the engagement is in service of those specific decisions. The output is a decision memo, not a strategy paper — shorter, more direct, with a clear recommendation and the evidence behind it.
The 30-day follow-through
We include a 30-day follow-through session in every engagement. Thirty days after delivery, we meet with the client to review which recommendations have been acted on, which have been deprioritised (and why), and what obstacles have appeared. This creates accountability and surfaces implementation problems early when they’re still cheap to address.
The metric we use internally
We track the “recommendation adoption rate” — the percentage of our recommendations acted on at the 90-day mark. A low adoption rate is a signal that the engagement was too abstract, too expensive to implement, or solving the wrong problems.