How the people on your engagement get chosen, screened and contracted.
- Partner on every engagement, personally accountable
- 1
- Senior people on a delivery team
- 2 or 3
- Screening standard, completed before client access
- BS7858
On this page
Embedded in your organisation, not alongside it
Owns delivery and decision rights inside your management structure, not an advisory role.
Builds and ships inside your estate, in your repos, pair-programming with your engineers.
Owns the part that usually fails: getting your people to actually work the new way, measured, not assumed.
In your stand-ups, your repositories and your management structure, on your infrastructure.
Partner oversight on every engagement, and the escalation route.
What you have at each stage, and where it is written
Three stages. At each one, something you can hold us to arrives in writing.
- 01
At proposal
Before you have committed anything
- The team shape and the price, in writing
- How many people, in which roles, on which rung, at the published day rates the whole price derives from. You can do the arithmetic yourself before you commit.
- The partner who is accountable, by name
- James Rooney leads every audit personally and provides oversight on everything else, including programmes Tenhaw does not build. He is named from the first email, and he is your escalation route for the whole engagement.
The disclosure position
Associate names, CVs and pool size are not published, and clients are told the same. A proposal gives you the team shape, the roles and the price, and every associate is someone James has already delivered alongside.
- 02
With the Statement of Work
During supplier onboarding
- Confirmation of BS7858-standard screening
- Identity, right to work, employment history and criminal record checks, completed before any client access, to the same standard for associates as for employees. The evidence is provided during supplier onboarding.
- Insurance certificates, with the cover levels published
- Professional indemnity, employers' liability, public liability, cyber and legal expenses, every cover level published in figures on our security page. Name the limit your supplier standard requires, on any call, and the increased cover is in place at that limit within three working days, with the premium priced into the engagement.
- The Data Processing Agreement, with its sub-processor annex
- Including UK IDTA or EU standard contractual clauses and Article 28 change-notice terms, available for review during supplier onboarding, before signature.
- 03
In the contract you sign
Terms you can point at, for the life of the engagement
- No substitution without your written agreement
- The people on your engagement are not swapped out unless you agree to it in writing, as a term in the Statement of Work. If someone has to change, that is your decision to make.
- The same obligations as an employee
- Associates are contracted under the same confidentiality, screening and data-handling terms as employees, with no onward sub-contracting without your consent. Confidentiality survives the end of the engagement indefinitely.
- Least-privilege access, time-boxed to the engagement
- Access is requested against the principle of least privilege and time-boxed to the engagement, with a documented offboarding step on exit.
- Thirty days' notice, either way
- Retainer engagements are terminable by either party on thirty days' written notice under our published terms of business, and you own the work product and documentation up to the point of exit.
Each of those documents is published on this site or provided during supplier onboarding. The screening, contractual and insurance position in full, including what we do not yet hold →
A partner and a vetted associate pool, not a bench you pay for
Senior AI builders James has worked with directly and would put in front of a client without hesitation. They ship. And they are engaged for your work, not carried on a bench you pay for in the rate.
Known, not recruited
Every associate is someone we have delivered alongside. We do not go to market once a statement of work is signed, which is the practice that makes a small firm risky: nobody on your engagement is recruited after you commit.
Selected for pace
The pool is weighted towards builders who get things into production, not towards people who present well. The two-week proof of concept on our live insurance engagement is the standard of pace we hire against.
You do not pay for a bench
Associates are engaged for your work rather than carried between engagements, so there is no utilisation gap priced into your rate. That is a large part of why the rate card is what it is.
James is on every engagement
He leads every audit personally and provides oversight on everything else, including programmes we do not build. He is accountable for the outcome and he is the escalation route, not a partner who appears at the kickoff and the closedown.
Conflicts of interest, and what we will put in the contract
Nothing moves between engagements: no code, no prompts, no requirement sets, no data and no roadmap, and confidentiality survives the end of an engagement indefinitely. Everyone we put on your work is contracted to those obligations and works inside your estate under your access controls, so there is no shared environment for anything to cross in.
If a specific firm would be a conflict for you, name it on the first call and we will tell you immediately whether we are working with them, and we will accept a named-competitor restriction in the statement of work where you want one. What we will not offer is blanket sector exclusivity: we work across financial services, retail and consumer, industrial and energy, and the public sector, and we intend to keep doing so.
Two team shapes, five roles, and the rate each one bills at
Rates are the published day rates, excluding VAT, at 20 billable days a month. Every monthly price on the services pages derives from them, so you can check the arithmetic.
Design pair
2 peopleDesigning the operating model and the agentic architecture together
- Operating-Model Lead£1,250 a day
- Owns roles, decision rights, accountability and the governance around agent decisions.
- Agentic Architect£1,250 a day
- Owns the platform, data foundations, integration and security the build will depend on.
Build team
3 peopleBuilding and shipping inside your estate, under partner oversight
- Agentic Lead£1,250 a day
- Owns delivery and decision rights inside your management structure, not an advisory role.
- Forward-Deployed Engineer£1,250 a day
- Builds and ships inside your estate, in your repos, pair-programming with your engineers.
- Adoption Lead£950 a day
- Owns the part that usually fails: getting your people to actually work the new way, measured, not assumed.
The adoption lead is the cheapest seat on the card and the one the engagement turns on
At £950 a day this is the lowest rate we publish. It reflects what the market pays for the role, not what the role decides. Adoption is the job that usually fails: getting people to work the new way, and measuring that they have. An agent that works and that nobody uses is a failed programme with a working demo inside it.
This is the person who will be in your building, sitting with the team whose work changes, watching what they actually do rather than what the process says they do, and reporting adoption alongside what reached production that month.
The associate terms on the rate card apply to this seat as to every other. Screened and contracted to the same obligations as employees. Never used to pad a team.
What happens when it is not straightforward
What happens if James is unavailable?
Every engagement is staffed as a team, with a senior practitioner alongside James, so delivery continues if he is unavailable. The associates on the engagement carry the work and oversight transfers to that practitioner, for an audit as for a design pair or a build team. All code, documentation and credentials live in your repositories and your accounts from day one, and your contract carries thirty days' notice either way.
Am I buying a team that does not exist yet?
You are buying people we have already delivered alongside: nobody on the engagement is recruited after you commit, and the people on it are not substituted without your written agreement. They are senior people engaged for your work, with no bench priced into the rate, and the capability transfers to your permanent team, who pair-program with ours for the whole build.
Continuity, and where it is written
Every engagement is staffed as a team, so delivery continues when one person is unavailable. On a fixed-price audit the associates on the engagement carry the work inside the delivery window in your Statement of Work: a defined scope, a fixed price and six to eight weeks to deliver it. On a retainer the backstop is the notice period, thirty days either way.
If your operational resilience assessment requires a maximum tolerable outage in the contract, it is a Statement of Work term: raise it on the first call and we will agree the figure there.
Where a firm this size stops being the right answer
Tenhaw works with organisations from around 500 people to 100,000 and more. The constraint is rarely your size; it is the shape of what you are buying.
- 01
You need hundreds of people, in several countries, at once
A global consultancy is the right buy when the work needs hundreds of people across multiple countries, deep multi-domain regulatory expertise, or when board expectation requires the brand. - 02
Your procurement standard requires permanent delivery headcount
Tenhaw supplies senior people on an engagement basis: no pyramid of juniors, no bench priced into the rate, and the lasting capability built in your permanent team, who pair with ours for the whole build. A standard that requires salaried delivery staff on the supplier's own payroll is describing a different model. - 03
You want the whole programme staffed by one supplier
Tenhaw sells an audit, a proof of concept, a design pair, a build team of three and programme management. Above that, the right shape is us running or advising the programme while somebody else supplies the volume, and the programme management rung is bought on its own for exactly that reason.
How many engagements run at once
We do not publish a cap, because an honest number moves with the shape of the work rather than with a policy. What we commit to is this: when we are full we say so on the first call and tell you when the next slot opens, rather than taking the work and thinning the team.
Each line is a case where you should buy from somebody else. The comparisons in full →
Who is accountable for your engagement
James leads every audit personally and provides oversight on everything else, including programmes Tenhaw does not build.
James Rooney
Founder and Transformation Director
Organisations James has delivered inside, as an employee, a contractor or through Tenhaw. Not a Tenhaw client list. The engagements that were Tenhaw's are named as such on the case studies page.
The short version
A hands-on delivery leader branded a “delivery firefighter” for stepping into critical situations and making them work. He has spent a decade turning around high-stakes software programmes, from global enterprises to fast-moving startups. The Tenhaw Way is the methodology built from everything that worked.
What is relevant to an agentic programme
Ordered by what you came to assess, not by date. The full chronology is further down.
The live agentic engagement
Now, ongoingEmbedded agentic lead, client unnamed at their request
- Month one was an audit that ran through the whole programme rather than around it: unblocking the data issues holding up development and testing, and producing the outputs that set MVP focus, data foundations and the AI operating model.
- Month two rebuilt, as a working proof of concept in two weeks, ground the business had been circling for roughly twelve months: PDFs in, business intelligence out, on Azure. The entire fortnight was pair-programmed with one of the client's own engineers, who ended it saying they were 70% confident they could run the process without us.
- Month three is productionising it against the client's security standards, and the result will be published either way. What stands today is a working proof of concept, built inside a regulated estate and pair-programmed with the client's own engineer.
HSBC
Aug 2024 to Nov 2025Senior Delivery Consultant / Product Manager
- Led the proof of concept for an AI Voice Insights platform inside a regulated bank: natural language processing, sentiment and entity recognition over enterprise voice data, with innovation, operations and risk in the room from the start. It projected 1.5 million admin hours a year, a projection, not a saving anyone has banked, and it did not reach production.
- Delivery Lead for Global Payment Solutions, co-leading the design and piloting of the target operating model for 500 teams and a $450M portfolio. The model was validated in pilot and is due for global rollout in 2026.
- Advised the CIO's office on target operating models across 150+ teams and a $102M budget, and ran the executive team's own delivery cadence: a live Kanban of every initiative and dependency, daily executive stand-ups, and annual planning completed ahead of schedule for the first time in years.
Microsoft
Dec 2025 to Feb 2026Program Manager, EMEA Data Centre Operations
- Orchestrated priority programmes for the EMEA senior leadership team in Data Centre Operations, creating visibility on high-level workloads so executive decisions were made against what was actually in flight. Three months, and the most recent of the roles held inside an organisation, not delivered to one.
Eleven organisations, and what the work was at each
One line on each, and every one of them appears in the timeline below.
- Tecknuovo
- A centralised PMO built from zero across 19 projects in 18 client accounts and a £35M budget, with seven junior delivery professionals mentored alongside hands-on work on at-risk projects.
- Anglo American
- The digital delivery function for an internal hydrogen energy venture, defined from nothing inside a mining group.
- Discovery+
- The EMEA rebrand, launched across all platforms.
- Yondr
- Erratic output turned into a predictable delivery cadence.
- Greggs
- The mobile app and data integration squads, as Scrum Master and Agile Coach.
- Ostmodern
- Concurrent video platform builds for F1TV, Sky, SoulCycle and The Emmys, run in parallel.
- Colart
- Agile processes and Jira workflows designed from scratch after three teams merged.
- Bold Six Solutions
- A mobile app startup, briefly founded and run.
- Globelynx
- Delivery lead times cut 60%, and £100,000 of supplier savings negotiated.
- Salmon
- Five agile teams supported through the £1bn YOOX NET-A-PORTER re-platform.
- EY
- Financial remediation, with a Diploma in Regulated Financial Planning completed in six months.
Across every one of them the pattern was the same: brilliant people, broken visibility. Teams shipped features but nobody could tell you what those features were worth. Velocity charts went up, but business metrics did not move. Team health was invisible until someone quit. Forecasts were finger-in-the-air guesses dressed up as confidence.
James codified everything that worked into The Tenhaw Way, a delivery methodology built around outcomes rather than outputs, and published it in full so a team can adopt it without hiring us. What Tenhaw sells is the people who have sat in the room, made the change happen, and learned what sticks.
Career timeline
This is a career, not a client list, and every row says which it is.
- Tenhaw engagement
- Delivered under the Tenhaw banner and written up on the case studies page. Several predate the company's incorporation and were delivered by James personally on contract.
- Employed or contract role
- James held a delivery or transformation role inside the organisation, on contract or in a permanent position. Not a Tenhaw client contract.
- Own venture
- A company James founded and ran himself.
Several roles ran concurrently or part-time within longer contract windows, which is why some periods overlap. Where a case study quotes a duration, it is the active delivery period rather than the full contract window.
- MicrosoftDec 2025 – Feb 2026Employed or contract role
Program Manager, EMEA Data Centre Operations
- HSBCAug 2024 – Nov 2025Employed or contract role
Senior Delivery Consultant / Product Manager
- TecknuovoOct 2023 – Jun 2024Tenhaw engagement
Portfolio Manager
- YondrSep 2022 – Mar 2023Tenhaw engagement
Transformation Consultant
- GreggsNov 2021 – Sep 2022Tenhaw engagement
Scrum Master / Agile Coach
- Anglo AmericanJul 2021 – Jan 2023Tenhaw engagement
Lead Technical Delivery Manager
- DiscoveryOct 2020 – Jul 2021Employed or contract role
Technical Delivery Manager
- OstmodernJun 2019 – Oct 2020Employed or contract role
Technical Delivery Manager (F1TV, Sky, The Emmys)
- ColartApr 2018 – May 2019Tenhaw engagement
Scrum Master
- Bold Six SolutionsFeb 2018 – Apr 2018Own venture
Founder, Head of Data & Delivery
- GlobelynxJun 2017 – Feb 2018Tenhaw engagement
Delivery & Special Projects Coordinator
- Salmon (YNAP)Mar 2016 – May 2017Employed or contract role
Delivery Coordinator / PMO
- EYJan 2015 – Mar 2016Employed or contract role
Associate, Financial Remediation
Education
MA International Business Management (Merit)
Newcastle University Business School, 2013–2014
BSc Psychology
Newcastle University, 2010–2013
Four things every engagement is run on
Landing change is the hard part
Anyone can buy a tool. Making hundreds of people work differently, and sustaining that change, takes someone who has done it before, at scale, across cultures and industries.
Value over velocity
Story points, velocity charts and burndown lines tell you how busy a team is. They tell you nothing about whether the business got what it needed. That has to change.
Team health is non-negotiable
The best delivery comes from teams that are sustainable, psychologically safe and trusted to make decisions. You cannot measure outcomes if the people delivering them are burning out.
Forecasting, not guessing
Inspired by F1's simulation-driven approach: run 10,000 scenarios and give stakeholders a probability rather than a promise.
Every engagement is built to leave. Start with one call.
A 30-minute call with James Rooney, who leads every engagement personally. Ask what the team on yours would look like, what it has delivered before, and what happens if one of them is not right. You will leave with a rough scope whether you engage us or not.
most start with a fixed-price Agent-Readiness Audit · £30k–£90k · 6–8 weeks
Calendar not loading? Open it on cal.com or email hello@tenhaw.com.