Sizing the work: review, diagnostic or remediation programme

Between a free self-serve check and a delivery programme sit three commitments worth making. They differ by what they produce, not by how long they run.

A review answers the question a leadership team asks: what state is this installation in, and what would it take to put it right. A diagnostic answers a narrower and harder question: within a defined area, which configuration decisions and defects are costing money now, in what order should they be corrected, and what does each correction take. A remediation programme answers neither. It assumes both answers exist and commits people to doing the work.

It is easy to commission these in the wrong order. A programme gets raised because the symptoms are loud, before anyone has written down what the system actually does, and the opening weeks of that programme go on discovering what a three-week diagnostic would have established first.

Ahead of all three sits the free configuration health check on this site: twelve questions, answered in about two minutes, scored on the page, with no email address asked for at any point. It does not size the work. It tells you whether the conversation is worth having.

Judge the three by the artefact that lands on the table at the end, because that artefact is what the budget actually buys.

A review

An independent written review of an HR and payroll installation, carrying findings, remediation options and consultancy estimates against those options, written for an executive audience rather than for a systems team. Where the question runs above the system rather than inside it, the same work extends into workforce and people plan analysis, an HR transformation plan, a knowledge and training strategy, or a briefing written for a leadership team. The output is a document a director can put in front of a board without translating it first.

A diagnostic

The Unit4 X-Ray is a structured strategic diagnostic of a defined area of a Unit4 Business World estate, delivered as a written executive-grade assessment with a prioritised remediation roadmap. It produces three deliverables: a plain-English executive report, a technical configuration blueprint for the systems team, and a sequenced remediation roadmap with effort and risk profile against each item. Price: £14,750 indicative; subject to scoping. Duration: About 3 weeks subject to agreed scope. Subject to formal scoping and a written agreement covering fees, deliverables and delivery arrangements.

A remediation programme

Delivery rather than assessment: someone working to the roadmap, configuring, testing and proving the change. Engagements run on day-rate or fixed-scope arrangements, inside IR35 where required, with scope, deliverables and fees agreed in writing. Where the work is packaged rather than open-ended, both the fee and the duration are fixed, and the fee is confirmed in the first call.

Three questions settle it, and they are worth answering honestly before a business case is drafted rather than after it is rejected.

• Can you state the problem in one paragraph a non-specialist would accept? If the honest answer involves listing symptoms rather than naming a cause, you need a review. Nothing further can be costed until the estate has been described.
• Can you name the fixes, in order, with an effort figure against each? If the cause is understood but the sequence is guesswork, you need a diagnostic. A roadmap built without one tends to be a list of the loudest complaints in the order they were received.
• Can you name who does the work next month? If the first two answers exist and this one does not, you need a remediation programme, and only then. Raising it earlier means paying delivery capacity to carry out discovery.

The failure mode in each direction is different and both are expensive. Oversizing produces a commitment that will not survive scrutiny at the point the business case is challenged, because nobody can say precisely what the money buys. Undersizing produces a review that everyone agrees with and nobody acts on, because no delivery capacity was ever attached to it.

One published figure, and structure everywhere else, so that a budget holder can see what is fixed before any scoping call happens.

The Unit4 X-Ray carries the figure above. Every other route states its structure instead: what is fixed, what is included, what sits outside scope, and the fact that the fee is confirmed in the first call. There is no band, no lowest-price framing and no figure attached to work that has not been scoped, because a number quoted before scope is a number that moves later.

Whichever size is raised, the arrangement is written down: day-rate or fixed-scope, inside IR35 where required, with scope, deliverables and fees agreed in writing before work starts. Commissioning is subject to your organisation’s procurement rules and delegated authority, and the sequence above is designed so that the first commitment is small enough to fall inside most delegated limits.

A central Unit4 support function in higher education was carrying a ticket backlog its own team could not clear and could not independently prevent.

The obvious instinct was to raise a programme. What the situation actually needed was smaller and more specific: a defect tracking and resolution routine running through the service desk, service levels managed rather than reported, and the upskilling that let the existing team run the routine once the engagement ended. The backlog halved, service-level compliance came back across the team’s tickets, and the capability to hold it there stayed inside the organisation.

Sized as a programme, the same work would have bought a longer engagement and left the same team with the same habits. Sized as a review, it would have produced an accurate description of a backlog nobody then had capacity to clear.

Read the case in full on the case studies page.

Three routes, in ascending order of commitment, and none of them requires an email address to start.

• Run the free configuration health check. Twelve questions across the six assessment domains, scored on the page in about two minutes: the Unit4 configuration health check.
• Compare the routes against your own situation. The five rungs, what each includes and what each excludes, are set out on services, and the diagnostic itself is described in full on the Unit4 X-Ray brief.
• Read the worked example. The higher-education support engagement above is written up as a support backlog cut by 50 per cent.