Approach
Careful work, in small, visible steps.
Our method is not a proprietary framework. It is a set of ordinary disciplines, applied consistently, that make technology work less surprising.
The stages
From question to handover.
- 01
Listen
We begin with your goals, constraints and history. Why is the system like this? What has been tried? What would make this project a success in a year? The answers often change the brief.
- 02
Assess
We look at the evidence: code, configuration, logs, costs and the way people really work. You receive a written view of what we found, including what is already good.
- 03
Design
We offer options with costs, risks and trade-offs, and we give a recommendation. You make the decision with the reasoning in front of you.
- 04
Deliver
We work in short cycles, showing real progress. Risky items come first, so unwelcome surprises arrive early, when they are cheapest to deal with.
- 05
Hand over
We document, train and pair with your team, and we remain available during the transition. The test is whether your team can confidently change the system without us.
Working together
What it is like day to day.
One accountable contact
You will always know who is responsible for the work and who to ask.
Regular, honest updates
We report what was done, what is next, and what might go wrong. Bad news travels fast, along with a proposal.
Your tools, your accounts
Wherever possible, the work lives in your repositories, cloud accounts and ticketing system from the first day.
Written decisions
Significant choices are recorded with their reasons, so nobody needs to guess at them later.
Change is expected
When we learn something that changes the plan, we say so and agree together how scope, time or cost should move.
Engineering standards
The habits we bring to every project.
- Everything important is under version control, including infrastructure and configuration
- Peer review for changes, and automated tests in proportion to risk
- Least-privilege access, with named accounts and multi-factor authentication
- Secrets kept in a proper secret store, never in code or chat
- Repeatable deployments, with a known way to roll back
- Monitoring that tells you when users are affected
- Backups that have actually been restored
- Accessibility and performance tested on realistic devices and networks
Security and data
How we treat your information.
We ask only for the access that the work needs, and we remove it when the work ends. Where practical, we use test data in place of real customer records.
Please do not send passwords or sensitive records by email. We will agree a suitable secure channel, and confidentiality terms can be signed before you share anything sensitive.
What we will not do
A few things worth saying plainly.
- Promise specific outcomes we cannot control, such as being “unhackable”
- Recommend a product because of a commission or a resale margin
- Test any system without written authorisation from its owner
- Keep your system deliberately hard to understand, so that you must keep calling us
- Take on work that we are not the right people to do. We would prefer to tell you, and suggest where else to look
Start a conversation
Tell us what you are trying to do.
A few plain sentences are enough. Send us the problem, the deadline if there is one, and what has already been tried. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people to help.
Get in touch support@vnet.nz