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Solution 06 / Fractional Data & AI Leadership

Technical judgement on the decisions that are expensive to reverse.

Architecture decisions, vendor selection, roadmap sequencing and project recovery, for organisations that need the judgement more often than they need the headcount.

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01The problem

Data and AI decisions are expensive to reverse. A platform choice, a vendor contract, or an architecture committed to in month two constrains everything for years. Most growing companies face these decisions before they can justify (or successfully recruit) a full-time Head of Data or VP of AI, so the calls get made by whoever is nearest, or deferred until they are made by default.

Typical symptoms

  • A major platform or vendor decision pending, with no in-house expert to own it
  • An AI or data programme that has slipped twice and is being managed by optimism
  • Engineers making architecture calls well outside their experience, without support
  • Vendor proposals nobody in the room can technically challenge
  • A roadmap that is a list of technologies rather than a sequence of outcomes
  • A stalled project where nobody will say plainly whether it should continue

Decisions we help you make

  • Build versus buy, argued against real total cost and switching cost
  • Which initiatives are sequenced first, and which are explicitly not being done
  • What a vendor must prove before signature, and how that is tested
  • How the team should be shaped: roles, experience mix, and hiring order
  • What the kill criteria are for each initiative, agreed before it starts
  • Whether a struggling project should be recovered, rescoped, or stopped
02How we work on it

Methods we apply.

Architecture review against explicit, written trade-offs rather than defaults

Vendor scorecards with technical proof requirements, not feature-matrix comparisons

Roadmap sequencing by dependency, evidence and reversibility

Technical due diligence for investment, acquisition, or partnership

Project recovery: root-cause diagnosis, rescope, and a realistic plan

Team design, hiring specifications, and interview support

Regular steering cadence with named decisions and owners, recorded

Not every decision deserves the same rigour. Sorting by reversibility is what stops a team spending three weeks on a choice they could undo in a day, while a genuinely irreversible one gets made in a hallway.
03What moves

Metrics this work is measured on.

Decision cycle time on blocked callsDelivery predictability against planPlatform and vendor spend vs. budgetInitiatives stopped early on evidenceTeam capability growth
04What we need to start
  • Current architecture and system landscape
  • The decisions currently blocked, and what is blocking them
  • Roadmap, budget, and delivery history to date
  • Team composition and where the capability gaps are
  • Vendor contracts and commitments already in place
05Engagement path

How this becomes an engagement.

01

Orientation

1–2 weeks

Understand the systems, team and commitments well enough to give advice worth acting on.

02

Fractional Engagement

1–2 days per week

Ongoing technical direction, architecture review, and steering, with decisions recorded.

03

Transition

On hire

Hand over to the permanent leader you hire, including the context behind every open decision.

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Want to see what this looks like against your own systems?

Most engagements start with a short, fixed-scope assessment, enough to quantify the opportunity before anyone commits to a build.

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