Agentic Build Team

Three forward-deployed practitioners: an Agentic Lead who owns the operating model and decision rights, a Forward-Deployed Engineer who builds and ships inside your estate, and an Adoption Lead who owns the part that usually fails, getting people to actually work the new way. James Rooney provides partner oversight on every engagement. Everyone on the team is someone he has already delivered alongside, screened to BS7858 standard before any client access, and every person on your engagement is senior.

An interim agentic lead is a senior practitioner who runs an organisation's agentic delivery from inside its management structure for a defined period rather than as a permanent employee. At Tenhaw the role sits at the front of the Agentic Build Team: real decision rights, a real reporting line, accountability for the value delivered each month, and a dated exit with the capability owned by your permanent team. James Rooney is embedded in that role on a live engagement inside a London specialty insurance business, which is where the method on this site is being run in anger.

Not from this rung. A build team is three people because shipping needs three: someone holding delivery, someone building, and someone owning adoption. If what you want is one senior person holding delivery, governance and supplier management while other people build, that is programme and delivery management at £18,000 to £35,000 a month, and it can be run fractionally from around three days a week. We would rather point you at the cheaper rung than sell you two people you do not need.

Measurable value is delivered every month, and the team commits to it in writing and reports against it. There is no distant go-live to wait for, so you can judge the work on evidence within the first thirty days. A month that delivers no measurable value is reported as a failed month, and that is the commitment we ask to be held to from month one.

The exit is designed at kickoff rather than negotiated at the end. The team pair-programs with your engineers throughout, recruiting your permanent team is an explicit deliverable, and the final sixty days are a documented handover with a decreasing-involvement taper. On a recent engagement, a client engineer who paired on a two-week build finished it 70% confident they could run the process unaided.

£70,000–£85,000 per month for a team of three under partner oversight, typically on a 6–12 month engagement. That is comparable to a mid-sized consultancy engagement team, but resolves to three senior practitioners accountable for the outcome rather than a pyramid of juniors.

From the published rate card, so the monthly figure is built out of day rates rather than negotiated. The interim agentic lead and the forward-deployed engineer sit at the senior practitioner rate of £1,250 a day, the adoption lead at the associate rate of £950, and engagement prices derive from the rate card at twenty billable days a month. £70,000 to £85,000 a month is those three seats held for the length of the engagement, with partner oversight from James Rooney inside the fee rather than an account-management layer added on top. All rates exclude VAT and are published in full, so every component of the monthly figure is visible.

No, and that is deliberate. The team is three people, an interim agentic lead, a forward-deployed engineer and an adoption lead, under partner oversight from James Rooney, and it does not get bigger than that. Capacity grows on your side instead. Your own engineers pair-program with ours for the whole build rather than for a handover fortnight at the end, and the transfer is measured, so more of your people can do the work while the engagement is running rather than after it ends. If the programme needs hundreds of people mobilised across many countries, this is the wrong rung and we will say so.

Typically six to twelve months, as a monthly retainer with thirty days' notice either way and an exit date agreed at kickoff rather than left open. The shape is consistent. Month one is spent embedding properly, with a real reporting line, real decision rights and real access, because a team without authority is an expensive advisory function. Months two to four ship something that matters into production with the governance around it. Months five to nine scale the pattern, upskill your engineers and recruit your permanent team while the work is live, and the final sixty days are a documented handover with a decreasing-involvement taper.

Yes. On payment of the applicable fees you own all deliverables, documentation, designs and code created for you, including anything built during a month that failed, and Tenhaw asserts no ownership over anything in your environment. Everything is deployed on your infrastructure, in your repositories, under your controls, so ending early leaves nothing to migrate off our estate because nothing was ever on it. Either side can terminate on thirty days' written notice under the published terms of business, and the ownership position sits in the standard terms every engagement is contracted under rather than something to negotiate on the way out.

A forward-deployed engineer builds and ships inside your estate rather than writing recommendations about it. The work happens in your repositories, on your infrastructure, under your controls and your organisation's policies, and the engineer pair-programs with your own engineers for the whole build rather than for a handover fortnight at the end, with the transfer measured. On an Agentic Build Team it is one of three seats, alongside the interim agentic lead and the adoption lead, and it bills at the published senior practitioner rate of £1,250 a day. Because nothing was ever built on our estate, there is nothing to migrate off it when the engagement ends.

Often you should, and a permanent internal team in post and operating is one of the board outputs this engagement is judged on. The build team covers the gap before that, when the permanent team does not exist yet and the agenda will not wait for the search to finish. Three senior practitioners at £70,000 to £85,000 a month is a monthly retainer either side can end on thirty days' notice, with measurable value you can hold the team to from month one and an exit date agreed at kickoff. Recruiting your permanent team then happens across months five to nine, while the work is live rather than after we leave.

Yes. Engagements are retainer-shaped rather than milestone-shaped, so the monthly fee stands, and what changes is what you are told and what you can do about it. A month that ends with no measurable value delivered is reported to your sponsor as a failed month, in those words, in the same pack as everything else, and it does not get renamed a discovery month. On payment you own all deliverables, documentation, designs and code created for you, including anything from a month that failed. Either side can end the engagement on thirty days' written notice, and two failed months without a credible cause is a reasonable moment to use it.

A sponsor who can give the team a real reporting line, real decision rights and real access, because month one is spent embedding properly and a team without authority is an expensive advisory function. Practically that also means whoever owns the repositories and environments the work will run in, since everything is deployed on your infrastructure under your policies, and the engineers who will pair with ours through the build. All three practitioners are screened to BS7858 standard before they touch your estate. Beyond that, month one is ours to run, and by months two to four the team is shipping something that matters into production.

Inside it. Partner oversight from James Rooney sits within the £70,000 to £85,000 rather than an account-management layer added on top, and there is no pyramid of juniors behind the three seats. In practice it means the monthly value commitment, the failed-month report and the exit taper all sit with the partner whose name is on the engagement rather than with a client-service tier relaying messages between you and the people doing the work. He is currently embedded as an interim agentic lead inside a London specialty insurance business, so the method the team runs is one he is running himself.

A board that has appointed a Head of AI and now needs a delivery team under them is one of the situations this rung is built for. The three seats sit inside your management structure rather than alongside it, so the interim agentic lead runs delivery with a real reporting line into your Head of AI and accountability for the value committed each month, rather than competing for the mandate they already hold. The engineer builds in your repositories and the adoption lead owns the change, with partner oversight from James Rooney rather than an account-management layer, and a dated exit that leaves the capability with your permanent team.

Built in. Governance, audit trails and human-in-the-loop gates are on the deliverable list rather than a later phase, and the first production release in months two to four ships with the governance around it rather than following on behind. That matters because retrofitting an audit trail onto a live agentic workflow is a rebuild, and because your risk function will want to see how a decision was reached before it lets the workflow scale. Everything runs on your infrastructure under your controls and your organisation's policies, so the evidence sits in your estate from the start.

You and the team, in writing, and the monthly commitment is written into the Statement of Work rather than left to a conversation. It is a measurable amount of value priced in currency, so it is a number your sponsor recognises rather than a list of activity, and the team reports against that same number in the same pack every month. If it is not met, the report states what was committed, what actually shipped and the specific cause, and it reaches the sponsor inside the same reporting cycle rather than at the next steering committee. How outcomes get priced is part of the delivery method published free on this site.

A forward deployed engineer is a software engineer who builds inside a customer's organisation, in that customer's repositories and cloud tenancy rather than advising from outside it. Tenhaw holds that seat on an Agentic Build Team. On a live London specialty insurance engagement a two-week proof of concept turned PDFs into business intelligence, pair-programmed with a client engineer who finished 70% confident of running it unaided. It differs from a consultant, who recommends and hands over, and from a contractor working a ticket queue, because the engineer carries a real reporting line and is accountable for a system that runs. The title came out of enterprise software, where vendors put engineers on customer sites to build against live systems.

If that is how your repositories work, yes. The Tenhaw forward-deployed engineer builds inside your repositories, on your infrastructure, under your controls and your organisation's policies, so your branch protection, review rules and merge gates apply to that work just as they do to your own team's. Most of it is written in a pair with one of your engineers, at the published senior practitioner rate of £1,250 a day, so the reviewer has usually already seen it. On payment you own all deliverables, documentation and code. What is worth settling before month one is who holds the approver role when your own engineers are the ones pairing, because the same person cannot be both the build and the check.

It shapes what gets committed rather than stopping it. Everything a Tenhaw build team ships is deployed on your infrastructure, in your repositories, under your controls and your organisation's policies, so your change process governs the release rather than ours. What the team commits to each month is a measurable amount of value priced in currency, not a weekly production push, so a board that sits monthly becomes a named dependency in that commitment. If a release slips because the board did not sit, the report names that as the specific cause rather than calling the month complex. Where your board meets quarterly, the sequencing is worth agreeing before kickoff rather than discovering it in month three.

No, and Tenhaw does not assume any. The forward-deployed engineer pair-programs with your engineers on the real system for the whole build rather than running a handover workshop at the end, and the delivery method they are learning is published free on this site, so your people can read it before anyone turns up. The toolchain runs inside your estate, typically Claude Code with OpenAI and Gemini models, chosen per case rather than as a house standard. What matters more than prior AI experience is that the engineers you nominate know your systems and are genuinely freed up, because the transfer is measured and it can only be measured on people who are actually in the pairs.

That is the adoption lead's job, and it is why Tenhaw holds a third seat rather than selling two builders. That seat sits at the published associate rate of £950 a day and owns getting people to work the new way, measured rather than assumed. It is the role most often cut from a business case and most often the reason it does not land. Pushback is usually about time rather than principle, since the pairing happens on live work in your repositories rather than in a training room, and the method is published in full so your engineers can judge it before they meet anyone. Where it is about the mandate instead, that is a sponsor decision.

A Statement of Work on Tenhaw's published terms of business, with the monthly value commitment written into it rather than left to a conversation. It carries thirty days' written notice either way, and ownership of all deliverables, documentation, designs and code passing to you on payment, including anything built in a month reported as failed. Liability is capped per engagement in that SOW, with confidentiality and data protection handled separately, and insurance figures are published in full, with cover increased for a specific engagement where your supplier standard requires it. There is no minimum term to negotiate down, because the engagement is monthly. How long your own third-party risk review takes usually sets the start date.

It surfaces long before the final sixty days, because recruiting your permanent team is an explicit Tenhaw deliverable rather than a hope, and it runs across months five to nine while the work is live. A permanent internal team in post and operating is one of the board outputs the engagement is judged on, so a search that is not landing appears in the monthly report with its specific cause rather than at the exit. If the date arrives anyway, the engagement is monthly on thirty days' notice either way, so extending is a decision taken in the open rather than a default. Which seat is still unfilled matters more than the delay itself.

Enough that it has to be planned rather than absorbed. The Tenhaw forward-deployed engineer pairs with your engineers on live work in your repositories for the whole build, so it is delivery work rather than training stacked on top of it, but the people you nominate need to be genuinely freed up rather than nominally available. For scale, on a live London specialty insurance engagement a client engineer who paired through a two-week proof of concept finished 70% confident of running it unaided. The transfer is measured, and it can only be measured on whoever is actually in the pairs. How many engineers you put through depends on how much of the capability you want held internally at the exit.

Usually not first, and Tenhaw does not require a finished data programme before month one. The first production release lands in months two to four and is scoped against the estate you actually have, with the governance around it, rather than waiting on a platform rebuild. Where data quality is genuinely what blocks the value it does not stay vague, because the monthly report names it as the specific cause of a missed commitment, and two failed months without a credible cause is a reasonable moment to use the thirty days' notice. What that leaves open is which of your data problems actually blocks the first workflow, as against the ones you have been meaning to fix anyway.

Because the tools are the cheap part and the accountability is not. Tenhaw publishes the delivery method those tools are used inside, free to adopt without hiring anyone, so £70,000 to £85,000 a month does not buy a technique. It buys three senior practitioners inside your management structure with a real reporting line and real decision rights, committing in writing each month to a measurable amount of value priced in currency, where a month that delivers none is reported to your sponsor as a failed month in those words. Partner oversight from James Rooney sits inside that fee. How much of that delivery, adoption and governance load your organisation already carries is the part only you can price.