Choosing between the five engagements, answered in full.
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15 questions on choosing between the five engagements, answered by Tenhaw, a UK AI consultancy and AI delivery partner based in London. Nothing here is a summary: each answer is the exact text from the page that owns it, and every group links back to that page for the context around it.
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All five engagements, priced side by side
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How do we choose between the five Tenhaw engagements?
Start from the decision you are facing rather than from the ladder. If the board has asked for an AI plan and you need a costed, defensible sequence, that is the audit. If you already know the workflow and need proof it can be done, the proof of concept. If pilots worked but nothing scales past the team that built them, the design team. If the capability has to be built and shipped inside your estate, the build team. And if several suppliers are building with nobody owning the whole programme, programme and delivery management. If none of those describes you, you may not need an engagement at all: the method is published free.
Do the five engagements have to run in order?
No. The ladder is a picture of increasing commitment, not a mandatory sequence. Most clients start on one of the first two rungs, the £44,000 audit or a £20k–£55k proof of concept, because both are fixed price and end in a decision rather than a dependency. But each rung is sold on its own, and programme and delivery management sits deliberately outside the sequence: it can be bought by itself, including for programmes other suppliers are building. Engage one rung, or all five as your transformation partner.
Can we skip the audit and go straight to a build team?
Yes, if you have already established where agents create value. The build team is the rung for boards that have appointed a Head of AI and need a delivery team under them now, and for businesses whose internal teams are at capacity but whose agenda is not. What we will not do is build on a guess. If nobody can yet say which workflows are worth attacking, four weeks and £44,000 of audit is far cheaper than finding that out inside a build running at £70,000 a month, and the audit itself ends in working prototypes against your data rather than a document, so it is not a delay you are paying for.
Why are some engagements fixed price and others monthly?
Because the two ways in are bounded and the delivery rungs are not. The audit at £44,000 and the proof of concept at £20k–£55k each end on a date with a fixed deliverable, so each is priced as one number agreed in writing before the work starts, and we carry the scope risk. The design team at £35k–£55k a month, the build team at £70k–£85k and programme and delivery management at £18k–£35k are monthly because the work continues rather than finishing. The delivery rungs commit in writing to a measurable amount of value every month and report against it, and all three monthly rungs are cancellable on thirty days' written notice either way.
Can I check the arithmetic behind each engagement price?
Yes, and publishing the rate card is what makes that possible. Every engagement price derives from it at twenty billable days a month: partner £1,560 a day, senior practitioner £1,250, associate £950, excluding VAT. Three days a week of a senior programme lead with partner oversight lands at the bottom of the £18k–£35k programme management band, and a build team of three under partner oversight resolves to £70k–£85k a month. Fixed-price engagements carry a modest premium over the day-rate equivalent, because the scope risk transfers to us.
Do all five engagements include an engineer who builds?
Three of the five do. The audit includes a build engineer because it ends in working prototypes, not only a document. The proof of concept is one or two engineers, and they are the whole team. The build team includes a forward-deployed engineer shipping inside your repositories. The other two deliberately do not: the design team designs what gets built rather than building it, and programme and delivery management governs whoever is building, including when that is nobody from Tenhaw. Every engineer on any of the three is at the published senior practitioner rate of £1,250 a day.
Do we need the design team before the build team?
Not always, but the two are shaped to hand over. The design team is a pair who produce the target operating model and the technical architecture together, ending on a sequenced build plan you can execute with us, yourselves or a third party. The build team is three practitioners who build and ship inside your estate. If your pilots worked and nothing scales past the team that built them, design first: separating the operating model from the architecture is why scaling stalls. If a credible design already exists, start the build team against it.
What is the smallest engagement we can buy from Tenhaw?
The two lowest-commitment ways to start are programme and delivery management at £18,000–£35,000 a month, bought on its own with no requirement that Tenhaw builds anything and cancellable on thirty days' notice either way, or an agentic proof of concept at £20,000–£55,000 fixed over two to four weeks. At the bottom of the band, £18,000 a month is roughly three days a week of a senior programme lead with partner oversight on top. Cheaper still is a thirty-minute call, which costs nothing and ends with a named rung, or an honest none of them.
How many people turn up on each of the five engagements?
One to three, all senior, with James Rooney accountable on every one. The audit is a senior operator and a build engineer alongside James, who leads every audit personally. The proof of concept is one or two engineers pairing with yours. The design team is a pair, an operating-model lead and an agentic architect. The build team is three practitioners under partner oversight, and it does not get bigger than that: a programme needing hundreds of people mobilised across many countries is a large firm's work, and we will tell you that rather than bid for it. Programme management is one senior lead, available fractionally from around three days a week.
Will Tenhaw run and support the system after handover?
No. We do not sell a managed service or 24/7 run-and-support after handover on any of the five engagements, and that is better known now than in week three of procurement. Every engagement is designed to end with your permanent team owning the thing, so if a support function has to exist around the system, that is your operations team or a different supplier, and we will help you specify what it needs to cover. The same boundary holds on the running costs: inference, platform and evaluation sit with you, on your own contracts, at cost, with no Tenhaw margin on them.
Which engagements come with a forward deployed engineer?
Two of the five. On an Agentic Proof of Concept one or two of them are the whole team for two to four weeks, and on an Agentic Build Team one ships alongside the interim agentic lead and the adoption lead under partner oversight from James Rooney. A forward-deployed engineer builds inside your estate rather than advising on it from outside: your repositories, your tenancy, your real data, pair-programming with your own engineers so the method transfers while the work is live rather than at a handover workshop afterwards. They work at the published senior practitioner rate of £1,250 a day, and they arrive attached to an outcome rather than sold as capacity by the head.
What happens if we start on the wrong engagement?
You find out fast, and it costs weeks rather than a year. The two ways in are fixed price and end on a date, £44,000 over four weeks for the audit and £20,000 to £55,000 over two to four weeks for a proof of concept, with nothing rolling on afterwards. The three monthly engagements are cancellable on thirty days' written notice either way, the handover date is agreed rather than left open, and on payment you own all the deliverables, documentation and code regardless. Before any of it, thirty minutes on a call is where we name the engagement that fits, including when the honest answer is none of them.
How long before we see something working?
Two to four weeks on a proof of concept, the fastest of the five: one real workflow, built in your environment, working by the end. The audit is close behind, with prototypes running against your real data inside your own tenancy by the end of week three and the board readout in week four. The monthly engagements report value instead of a first artefact. A build team embeds in month one and ships into production across months two to four, a design pair spends weeks one to three establishing current-state truth, and programme management's first four weeks establish what is genuinely in flight. On the delivery engagements, a month with no measurable value is reported as a failed month.
Can we run two engagements at the same time?
Yes, and the usual pairing is programme and delivery management over a delivery engagement. It sits deliberately outside the ladder, is bought on its own with no requirement that Tenhaw builds anything, and governs whoever is building, including a Tenhaw build team. Where we hold both the governance and a build role we say so explicitly to the board, and our own workstreams appear in the same table, to the same standard, as every other supplier's, including when we are the ones behind. Each engagement is priced and contracted separately, so ending one leaves the other untouched.
Which engagement fits if the problem is adoption, not technology?
Usually one of the two that own adoption explicitly. A build team carries an adoption lead whose whole job is getting people to work the new way, measured rather than assumed, and it is the role most often cut from a business case and most often the reason the business case does not land. A design pair works earlier and higher up: roles defined by the decisions they own, decision rights, and the governance that exists before anything is deployed. If the constraint is delivery discipline across several suppliers, that is programme and delivery management. The audit reads where your workforce is ready and where culture and incentives will block you, with the specific unblocks.
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Book thirty minutes1293 questions, grouped by subject
Every question answered anywhere on tenhaw.com sits in one of 51 groups. This is one of them.
- The audit and the proof of concept40
- The design pair and the build team36
- Programme and delivery management18
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