Twenty years of Microsoft 365 expertise — including eight years as a SharePoint Architect within Microsoft Services — available to your organisation as a trusted independent advisor. Senior architecture guidance, strategic counsel, and independent advice shaped entirely around what your situation requires.
Digital Workplace Consultancy & Strategic Advisory
Three situations that bring organisations to this service
This service does not have a single entry point. It has three — and each brings a different organisation, with a different immediate need, to the same place.
The first is a specific hard problem. An architecture decision that keeps being deferred because nobody is confident enough to make it. A Copilot deployment scheduled but the environment is not ready and the gap in expertise is real. A migration that stalled because the complexity was underestimated and the path forward is unclear. A governance framework that exists on paper but is not working in practice. The advisory engagement starts with the problem, resolves it, and continues if what the problem reveals is a broader need for ongoing senior expertise.
The second is an expertise gap. An IT team that manages the environment effectively day-to-day but lacks the senior Microsoft 365 architecture depth that a major initiative requires. Hiring for it permanently does not make commercial sense. Engaging a large consultancy means procurement overhead, paying for a team when you need an individual, and working with people who need weeks to understand your environment before they can contribute anything.
The third is an initiative on the horizon. Copilot by Q3. Migration by October. A digital workplace transformation starting in January. The decision is made and the budget is approved or in motion. What you need is a senior voice in the room from the start — someone who has delivered this type of initiative before, at this scale, and who can ensure the decisions that determine the outcome are made correctly before they become expensive to change.
What makes this different from a large consultancy
Engagement formats shaped around your situation
All engagements begin with a free 45-minute scoping conversation to understand your situation and recommend the structure that fits it most accurately. We offer four formats. An Advisory Day applies focused senior expertise to a specific problem, decision, or design challenge — the lowest-friction entry point into the relationship. An Advisory Block is a pre-purchased allocation of hours drawn down flexibly over three to six months, for organisations with ongoing needs but variable intensity. A Strategic Retainer provides regular monthly access plus ad-hoc availability — the model for organisations that have recognised the value of keeping senior Microsoft 365 expertise consistently close. Initiative Advisory is ongoing senior oversight tied to a specific programme from start to completion, for organisations that want a senior independent voice in the room throughout a major initiative without replacing the delivery team.
If one of our project services is a better starting point than open-ended advisory, we will tell you that directly in the scoping call.
The value of a senior advisor is not what they tell you to do. It is what they prevent you from doing — the decisions that look reasonable in the moment and create expensive problems six months later.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How is this different from hiring a Microsoft 365 consultant for a project?
A project consultant is engaged for a defined scope, delivers it, and disengages. The value they provide is bounded by the project — when it ends, the expertise leaves with them. The advisory relationship is different in kind, not just duration. It is ongoing, accumulates context, and applies to the decisions that shape your environment continuously — not just those that fall within a project scope. An advisor helps you design the governance framework, reviews it as it is built, identifies the elements that will not survive contact with reality, and is available when the first real challenge to it arises six months later.
We have a Microsoft partner managing our environment. Why would we need an independent advisor?
Microsoft partners are valuable for delivery. What most are structurally unable to provide is independent advice — because their commercial model involves earning margin on Microsoft licences and services, creating an alignment between their recommendations and Microsoft’s commercial interests. An independent advisor is not a substitute for a delivery partner. They are the independent voice that reviews the partner’s proposal, assesses the technical quality of their recommended approach, and ensures the recommendations your organisation receives are based on what you need rather than what the partner is incentivised to sell.
How do we build the internal business case for an ongoing advisory relationship?
Through the cost of its absence. Consider the significant Microsoft 365 decisions your organisation has made in the past twelve months — architecture choices, governance policies, technology purchases, initiative sequencing. For each one, ask: what would it have cost if that decision was wrong, and what would course correction have required? Senior advisory expertise reduces the probability of consequential decisions being made incorrectly. The cost of the advisory relationship, relative to the cost of a single significant Microsoft 365 decision going badly, is typically small.
What does a typical month in a Strategic Retainer look like?
It varies significantly depending on what is happening in your Microsoft 365 programme. In a month where a major architectural decision is being made, the time might be spent on a design review session, a workshop with your IT team, and a briefing for leadership. In a quieter month, a standing one-hour session might cover recent Microsoft 365 platform updates, emerging governance questions, and a review of environment changes from the previous month. The value is in the consistency of access and the accumulation of context — not in hitting a fixed monthly deliverable target.
Can the advisory relationship transition into a delivery engagement if we need it to?
Yes — and this is a common pattern. Advisory relationships frequently identify work that requires delivery: an architecture that needs to be restructured, a governance framework that needs to be built, a migration that needs a senior architect to lead it, an automation programme that needs expert delivery. Where that work falls within our service portfolio, we transition from advisory to delivery or run both in parallel. Delivery that follows an established advisory relationship is faster to scope, more accurately estimated, and more likely to produce the intended outcome — because the context and the constraints are already understood.
Is this service right for a smaller organisation or only for large enterprises?
Size is less relevant than Microsoft 365 maturity and the significance of the decisions being made. Some smaller organisations run complex, strategically important Microsoft 365 environments that generate real demand for senior advisory expertise. The right question is not whether you are large enough — it is whether the Microsoft 365 decisions you are making are significant enough, and frequent enough, to benefit from consistent senior expertise. If you are approaching a major initiative, dealing with a complex governance challenge, or making technology decisions with long-term consequences, the advisory relationship is likely to be valuable regardless of organisational size.
