Because the alternative is a free workshop that proves nothing and a full programme that asks you to trust us before we have shown anything. Thirty days at cost is enough to produce real numbers on real records, and cheap enough that walking away at the end costs nobody their credibility.

What do we get at the end?

Three artefacts. A register of the information in scope: what it is, where it sits, what obligations attach to it. A baseline of what it costs to hold and handle today. And a value case for governing it, with the cost take-out and the readiness gain quantified from your own figures rather than from a benchmark.

What if the value case says it is not worth it?

Then that is the finding, and it is worth exactly what it cost you to learn it before committing a programme budget. It happens. It is also the reason the proof is priced at cost: we have no margin riding on the answer.

What does it need from us?

Access to the records in scope, one person who can answer questions about the process, and a decision-maker at the end who will read the value case. Roughly two days of your people's time spread over the thirty.

← Information Value Management

Proof of Value

Thirty consultant days at cost, on one process or one slice of your estate, ending in a value case you can take to the board or walk away from.

What a proof of value actually is

Thirty days of senior consulting, charged at what they cost us rather than at what they are worth, spent on one process or one slice of your estate. It ends with a register, a baseline, and a value case with numbers in it.

It is not a discounted project. It is the part of a project that decides whether there should be one, priced so that the decision is cheap to make and honest when it is made.

Scope: one process, or one slice

A proof of value is small on purpose. It takes one scope you can name, an invoice flow, a personnel file, an archive nobody dares switch off, one department’s shared drive, and works it end to end: what is in it, what has to be true of it, what it costs to keep as it is, and what it would cost and return to govern it.

Anything wider than that is a programme, and a programme is what the proof of value exists to justify or to prevent.

The thirty days, roughly

The first ten are the inventory: what the slice contains, in what volume, under what obligations, and how much of it is redundant, obsolete or trivial. This is usually the first time anyone has seen it whole.

The middle ten are the baseline: what it costs to hold, to find, to handle and to keep compliant today, measured from your own figures rather than from a benchmark.

The last ten are the value case: what governing the slice would cost, what comes out in cost take-out and in AI readiness, in what order, and what the first step would be. It is written for whoever signs programme budgets, and it is written so that a no is as usable as a yes.

Where it leads

Either into a programme, sized from the proof rather than from a proposal, or into a clear answer that the estate is not the priority this year. Both are outcomes. What the proof of value prevents is the third one: a platform bought on a promise and configured to whatever the folders were already doing.

The wider picture it sits inside is Information Value Management, and the two outcomes it quantifies are cost take-out and AI readiness.

The first conversation is where we agree which process or which slice. It is thirty minutes, and it is where most proofs of value are already half scoped.

Scope a proof of value

Proof of value, asked plainly

Why at cost?
Because the alternative is a free workshop that proves nothing and a full programme that asks you to trust us before we have shown anything. Thirty days at cost is enough to produce real numbers on real records, and cheap enough that walking away at the end costs nobody their credibility.
What do we get at the end?
Three artefacts. A register of the information in scope: what it is, where it sits, what obligations attach to it. A baseline of what it costs to hold and handle today. And a value case for governing it, with the cost take-out and the readiness gain quantified from your own figures rather than from a benchmark.
What if the value case says it is not worth it?
Then that is the finding, and it is worth exactly what it cost you to learn it before committing a programme budget. It happens. It is also the reason the proof is priced at cost: we have no margin riding on the answer.
What does it need from us?
Access to the records in scope, one person who can answer questions about the process, and a decision-maker at the end who will read the value case. Roughly two days of your people's time spread over the thirty.