Two to three weeks
Know what to fix, and in what order
A two to three week assessment of your data estate. You finish with a written current-state view, a prioritised list of what is actually wrong, and a sequenced roadmap — whether or not you work with us afterwards.
Remote. Led and delivered by a senior practitioner, not a junior team.
Who this is for
The Health Check is aimed at organisations where one or more of these is already true. If none of them sound familiar, this is probably not the right engagement.
- Data is fragmented across systems that disagree with each other.
- Reporting is not trusted, and numbers get reconciled by hand before anyone will use them.
- A modernisation programme has stalled and it is not clear why.
- Governance gaps are known but not quantified, and an audit would be uncomfortable.
- There is pressure to do something with AI, and no clear answer on whether the data is ready.
What gets assessed
Six areas. The depth in each depends on what we find in the first week, and the areas that matter least to you get proportionally less time.
Architecture
How the estate is actually put together, as opposed to how the diagram says it is.
Integration
What moves where, by which route, and which pipelines are authoritative.
Data quality
Where quality is measured, where it is assumed, and what breaks downstream.
Governance
Ownership, definitions, lineage and controls — and whether they survive contact with a question.
Operating risk
Key-person dependencies, undocumented jobs, and what happens when something fails at 2am.
Prioritised opportunities
What could be improved, ranked by effort against the risk it removes.
How it runs
Weeks one and two are fixed. The third is used when the estate is large enough to need it, and we tell you which it will be before starting.
- 1
Week 1 — Access and discovery
Read-only access where it is available, documentation review, and interviews with the people who actually run the systems. Most of the useful material comes out of the interviews.
- 2
Week 2 — Analysis and prioritisation
Findings are assembled, tested against the people who described the problems, and ranked. Anything we cannot substantiate is dropped rather than softened.
- 3
Week 3 — Readout and roadmap (when needed)
A working session on the findings, then the written roadmap. Larger estates and multi-country scope are where the third week gets used.
What you are handed
Written documents you keep, not a slide deck presented once and taken away.
Current-state view
How the estate works today, written so that someone new to it can follow.
Findings
What is wrong, with the evidence for each and how it was established.
Risk and priority matrix
Every finding placed by the risk it carries against when it should be addressed.
Target recommendations
What to change, with the reasoning, including where the answer is to change nothing.
Sequenced roadmap
The order to do it in, and what each step depends on.
Risk and priority matrix
Illustrative exampleThe structure of the matrix, with sample entries. Real findings come from your estate; no client's assessment appears here.
| Risk | Now | Next | Later |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | Undocumented job feeding regulatory reporting | Single owner for the customer master | — |
| Medium | Duplicate pipelines for the same feed | Quality rules not attached to definitions | — |
| Low | — | Manual reconciliation before month end | Glossary terms without an owner |
What it is not
Stated here at full size rather than in the FAQ, because a scope limit you find later is worse than one you read before buying.
- Not an implementation. Nothing is built or changed in your systems during the assessment.
- Not a tool or vendor selection. If the roadmap needs one, that is a separate piece of work.
- Not a full data quality audit of every system. Six areas across the estate, not exhaustive profiling of each.
- Not a commitment to work with us afterwards. The roadmap is yours to run with anyone.
Questions
- What access do you need?
- Read-only access to the relevant systems is ideal, and schema exports plus documentation work where access takes too long to arrange. We can run the assessment on documentation and interviews alone, and we will say plainly which findings are weaker as a result.
- How much of my team's time does it take?
- Expect three to six people for roughly an hour each in week one, and a shorter follow-up with two or three of them in week two. The readout session is 90 minutes. We schedule around your team rather than the other way round.
- How is confidentiality handled?
- An NDA is signed before any access is granted. Nothing from your engagement is published, and no client is named on this site without written permission — the case studies here are anonymised by sector for that reason.
- What does it cost?
- The Health Check is quoted as a fixed price, agreed in writing before it starts, so the cost does not move with the hours. The quote depends on how many source systems and stakeholders are in scope. The scoping call itself is free and takes about 30 minutes.
- What happens afterwards?
- You keep the documents and can act on them with your own team, another firm, or with us. There is no obligation either way. If you do continue with us, the roadmap becomes the scope of the next engagement rather than something to redo.
- Can you guarantee the outcome?
- No, and be wary of anyone who does before looking at your data. What is committed is the deliverable: at the end you will have a written current-state view, prioritised findings and a sequenced roadmap. What those documents say depends on what is actually there.
Book a Data Health Check
Tell us roughly what is going on and we will come back with times for a 30-minute scoping call. No deck, no qualification script.