How We Work
Read the packages first. Recommend second.
These are the working rules we hold ourselves to on every engagement. They are specific on purpose, so you can hold us to them too.
We read the estate before we recommend anything
No plan we hand you will contain a recommendation that is not tied to named packages, jobs, tables and components. If we say a package should be rewritten, the document says which package and why. If we cannot tell you why, it goes in the risk register as an open question rather than into the plan as an estimate.
We do not sell a rewrite as a default
SSIS is a stable, well-understood ETL engine that still ships inside SQL Server, and Microsoft has not announced an end date for it. New platform investment is going elsewhere, and that is a real consideration on a long horizon — but it is not a deadline, and it is not a reason to rebuild a package that works.
Our assessments frequently conclude: keep most of it, move it as-is, rebuild these six. We would rather deliver that than a larger project.
We separate platform moves from logic changes
A lift-and-shift does not change package logic, and a rewrite does not happen during a platform move. Mixing the two makes every reconciliation difference ambiguous, and attribution is the whole value of a parallel run.
We verify cutovers, we do not announce them
Both estates load the same days into two places. We reconcile row counts, column sums and NULL counts per table per day, automated into the pipeline so that a failed reconciliation is a failed run. Differences that are expected — surrogate keys, read-window timing, deliberate bug fixes — are written down and signed off by name before cutover, not explained away after it.
We will not sign off a cutover on a clean fortnight that did not include a month-end.
We write things down for the person who stays
Every engagement produces documentation of what each job does, what it depends on, and how to debug it. The goal is a BI developer who can own the estate afterwards without calling us. That is a slightly awkward thing for a consulting firm to optimise for, and we do it anyway, because the alternative is an estate that nobody understands again in three years.
We work in your environment
Your repository, your SSISDB, your SQL Agent, your ticket queue. Not a copy, not a parallel process that has to be reconciled with yours at the end.
We are hourly, and we say when to stop
Hourly time and materials, as a project engagement or as staff augmentation. Scope, staffing and timeline are agreed in an initial conversation and revisited when the estate turns out to be different from the description — which it sometimes does, in both directions.
When the work is done, we say so. An engagement that ends is a better outcome for both of us than one that drifts.