Working with us Process & Timeline - FAQs

You can do just the Establish phase without committing to Build, and this is a legitimate and common way to work with us. The Establish phase stands alone: you receive an architecture, a priority dashboard list, and a delivery plan regardless of whether you proceed further, with us or with a different partner.

You see dashboards partway through a Build phase, deliberately — not only at the end. A Build phase is not delivered as one release at the end; priority dashboards are built and reviewed with stakeholders in the order agreed as highest-value during Establish, so the business is looking at real, working reports within the first few weeks, not waiting for a single reveal at the end of the engagement. This also functions as a validation checkpoint: if a number on an early dashboard does not match what a stakeholder expects, that is caught and resolved while it affects one report, rather than discovered at final sign-off when it might affect the semantic model underneath everything else. The last stage of Build is stabilisation, not first delivery: fixing edge cases, refining performance, and confirming the full set of reports together, once the individual pieces are already known to be right.

Each phase of a Power BI or Fabric implementation takes a predictable span. For a mid-market Power BI or Fabric estate, discovery and design typically runs two to four weeks, core build four to eight weeks depending on source complexity, hardening two to three weeks, and stabilisation a further two to four weeks of hypercare. Larger, multi-department rollouts extend each stage rather than skipping them.

A well-structured analytics delivery programme runs in sequential phases, each with its own outcomes and governance checkpoint: assessment (understand the estate and build a prioritised roadmap), foundation (stand up the governed platform, pipelines and semantic layer), pilot delivery (ship one high-value use case to real users), scaling (expand across subject areas in iterative releases), and optimisation (tune performance and cost, deepen adoption, and hand over capability). Value ships every phase rather than only at the end.

The three stages of the Analytics Acceleration Programme are Establish, Build and Continuity, and every AAP tier follows the same shape regardless of scale. Establish agrees priorities, reduces ambiguity and puts the right foundations in place so everyone is aligned on what good looks like before delivery starts. Build is where the focused work happens against those agreed priorities, whether that is reporting, data platform, governance or AI capability. Continuity is the part most one-off projects skip: an ongoing monthly rhythm that refines and governs the estate as the business changes, so confidence in the numbers does not quietly decay the way it does after a typical project goes live. The structure is what stops the usual cycle of a project shipping, priorities changing, spreadsheets creeping back in, and another project eventually being needed to fix it.

A phased analytics delivery runs in typically four stages: a discovery and design phase that sets scope and data sources, a core build phase that delivers the first working dashboards on a governed semantic model, a hardening phase covering security, row-level access and performance, and a stabilisation phase with hypercare support once real users are in the system. Each phase ends with a review checkpoint before the next is scoped in detail.

Build is core delivery: data foundations, semantic modelling, dashboard development, and governance configuration, based on the plan agreed in Establish. Duration typically runs eight to sixteen weeks depending on scope, quoted as a fixed price once the Establish phase has defined exactly what is being built.

Changes go through a short change-control step rather than being absorbed silently. We log the request, assess its impact on timeline, technical risk and business value, and agree whether it fits in the current phase, moves to the next one, or needs a separate scoped piece of work. That keeps the original plan honest instead of quietly expanding.