Why we spend a whole week on discovery before quoting

What discovery actually looks like

When we say "discovery", we don't mean a workshop. We mean two of our senior people coming and standing next to your team for a week, watching how the work actually happens.

This sounds expensive. It is. It costs roughly £4,500 — the price of finding out the truth before anyone signs a £40,000 contract.

What we're looking for

Three things, mostly:

1. The gap between the org chart and the real workflow. These are always different. Sometimes by a lot.
2. The undocumented rules. Every business has them. They live in the heads of the people who've been there longest. Software that doesn't capture them is software that gets fought.
3. The workarounds that have become the process. That spreadsheet someone built in 2014 that the whole department now depends on. The "just bear with me a sec" double-entry. The Slack message that triggers half the work.

You can't see any of this from a requirements document. You have to sit there and watch.

What you get out of it

At the end of the week, you have:

• A working clickable prototype of the core flows
• A right-sized requirements document — not a 200-page spec, but enough to be unambiguous
• A delivery plan with realistic costs and timelines
• A go / no-go recommendation. Sometimes "don't build this" is the right answer.

If you decide to go ahead, the cost of discovery comes off the build. If you don't, you keep everything we produced and you've spent £4,500 to dodge a £40,000 mistake. Either way it's the cheapest part of the project.

The boring reason it works

The reason this approach delivers projects within 10% of estimate, every time, is dull but real: we only ever quote things we've actually understood.

The horror stories you hear about software projects — the £200k that became £600k, the six-month build that took two years — almost always trace back to estimates given before anyone really understood the work. We don't do that. We can't, honestly. We'd go out of business.

So we charge for discovery, and we take it seriously. It's the most boring thing we do, and the most important.